Book Reviews

kivy, peter. The Performance of Reading: An Essay inthe Philosophy of Literature. Malden, MA: Black-well, 2006, xiii + 155 pp., $59.95 cloth.

Peter Kivys bold thesis in this very engaging andstimulating monograph is that literature in generalnot just drama or even poetry but also the novelshould be viewed as a performance art, analogous tomusic, where the instances of works through whichthey are appreciated are performances enacted byreaders. Reading itself, then, is a performing art. Kivyargues for a number of analogies between fictionalnarratives and musical scores. The literary text, hemaintains, is not a token of the literary work but, likethe musical score, a character in a notation for gen-erating instances of the work. Tokens of the musicalwork are performances, and tokens of the novel arereadings, construed as datable events. Furthermore,Kivy argues, silent readings of novels are analogousto performances of musical works in the head byscore readers. Performances of literary works in thehead can be seen as expressive soundings that,as in the case of soundings of musical works byscore readers, embody an interpretation of the over-all sense of the work. Given that the silent reading ofa novel can be viewed as a performance, Kivy furthermaintains, this is how it should be viewed: literaturein general, including the novel, is properly viewed asa performance art.

Kivy adduces a number of different considerationsin support of these striking claims. He draws our at-tention to the history of reception of literary works,offering informed speculations as to the overtly per-formative nature of such reception until relatively re-cently. The novel, he argues, initiated a widely sharedpractice of silent reading, but early theorists of thenovel viewed silent reading as a kind of disguisedperformance. Joseph Addison, for example, held thatreaders imaginatively realize a dramatic presentationof the narrated events. Kivy, citing approvingly Ed-mund Burkes criticisms of this view, claims, instead,that readers enact, in the head, something very like

the performance that Plato ascribed to Ion. Ion, Kivyargues, did two things. First, in reciting the texts ofHomer, he impersonated Homer, the teller of thestories. This involved an expressive presentation ofthe narrative proper, and also of imitative parts ofthe story, such as direct speech rendered in the voicesof the characters. Second, Ions performance em-bellished Homer, which, Kivy speculates, involvednot only commenting on the significance of the narra-tive but also assessing the plausibility and truth of itsexplicit or implicit propositional content. The silentreader, Kivy maintains, enacts her own inner Ion,expressively impersonating the storyteller, and criti-cally commenting and reflecting on the content of thenarrative. Such reflection takes place in the gapsthat punctuate, and the afterlife that follows, thereading performance in the narrow sense. The gapsand afterlife are, he maintains, essential elements inliterary experience and their critical dimension pro-vides the literary cognitivist with an answer to thecharge that the propositional contents of fictions arebanal. However, Kivy stresses, the case for viewingsilent reading as a performance of the literary workdoes not depend crucially upon the accuracy of hishistorical speculations. It depends, rather, upon thesense it makes of his reading experience, the phe-nomenology of which is described in often fascinatingdetail, and will, he believes, resonate with the literaryexperience of other readers.

As should be clear, this book is a mine of intrigu-ing speculations, ingenious argument, and stimulat-ing suggestions, made even more attractive by Kivysengaging style. There are, however, some questionsthat must be addressed if we are to be convinced bythe overall thesis of the book. Consider first the claimthat, in silently reading a novel, the reader can be seenas enacting an Ion-like performance in her head. Ion,in reciting Homer, impersonated the storyteller, andwe do the same in our heads when we silently read anovel, Kivy maintains (p. 59): We hear stories in thehead, the way Beethoven, when he read the scoresof Handel, heard musical performances in the head

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:1 Winter 2008c 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics

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(p. 63). The storyteller we impersonate is the per-son held responsible for constructing the storyeither the real author of the tale (Kivys own pref-erence) or a fictional or an implied author of somekind. Where novels have impersonal third-personnarratorsas, for example, in Graham Greenes TheHeart of the Matterthe silent reader impersonatesthe authorhere Greenetelling the story. What,however, of a novel with a first-person narrator, suchas David Copperfield? Given the Ion model, it seemsthat the reader impersonates Charles Dickens who ishimself impersonating David Copperfield, since thatis what the model takes a storyteller to do in tellinga first-person fictional narrative. In the case of directquotation in such a fiction, the reader must presum-ably impersonate the author impersonating the nar-rator impersonating one of the characters (see, forexample, the remarks [p. 60] on the epistolary novel,and [pp. 4445] on Ions imitation of both the nar-rative and imitative aspects of Homers telling). Butthis strikes me, at least, as a somewhat baroque de-scription of the phenomenology of reading. If silentreaders do indeed expressively sound direct quo-tations in a fictional narrative in distinctive ways, itseems more intuitive to say that they impersonate thecharacter himself, rather than enact the complex setof nested impersonations just sketched. The (real orassumed) author enters the picture only insofar asthe reader takes account of how the former intendsthe character to be understood. Or, again, what of anovel with a deceived or deceiving first-person nar-rator, such as Vladimir Nabokovs Pale Fire? Here,it seems, Kivys claim must be that the reader im-personates Nabokov impersonating the deceived Dr.Kinbote. But, once the reader grasps that Kinbote isa deceived narrator, how would such a nested imper-sonation differ, as a sounding, from the readersimpersonating Kinbote himself in light of her under-standing of Nabokovs narrative intentions? Thesematters need to be made clearer, I think.

A more serious worry concerns Kivys principalargument for taking the reading of literary fiction tobe a performing art, namely, that it makes best senseof his reading experience, of which, as noted, he pro-vides a rich account. But can this account bear theweight placed upon it in his overall argument? In-deed, this raises a more general question about therelationship between the descriptive and the norma-tive elements in Kivys book. At the very beginningof the book, he affirms that his thesis is not a norma-tive claim, about how we should read fictional works,but a descriptive claim, about how we, at least someof us, do read them (pp. 12). But, in the final sec-tions of the book, the question asked is a normativeonewhether, given that we can view reading as aperforming art, we should do so (p. 126). And this issurely the question that Kivy must address if he is to

defend the claim that the novel is a performance art.For what makes music and drama performance arts isnot merely that aficionados attend performances ofplays and musical works, but that it is only throughengagement with such performances that theatricaland musical works can be properly appreciated andevaluated. It is the role that performances by practi-tioners of the performing arts play in the appreciationand evaluation of works that makes theater and musicperformance arts.

But if this is true, then descriptive facts about thephenomenology of our reading experiences, howeverinsightful, cannot serve as the principal argument forviewing the reading of fictional literature as a per-forming art analogous to musical performance. Nor,I think, can the principle of parsimony, which is theother reason offered for viewing silent reading as aperforming art. For parsimony comes into play onlyif, as Kivy claims, the reading of literary fiction canbe viewed as a performing art bearing upon the ap-preciation and evaluation of literary works, and this,again, depends not upon the phenomenology of any-ones reading experience, but on the ways in whichthat phenomenology bears upon such appreciationand evaluation. Only if the sort of performancethat Kivy characterizes bears upon the appreciationof a work of literary fiction in a manner analogousto the way in which a performance (public or in thehead) of a musical work bears upon its appreciationcan our ability to perform a literary work in thehead support the conclusion that literature is prop-erly viewed as a performance art and reading as therelated performing art.

Can Kivy meet this challenge? Recall, first, the dis-tinction between the narrative and imitative elementsin the Homeric storytelling that Ion impersonates.The imitative element includes the representation,by the storyteller, of the utterances of the characters.There may indeed be a role, in the proper apprecia-tion of at least some literary fictions, for the readersexpressive sounding in the head of such utterances,for this may bear upon what is true of the characters inthe story. But, to be accorded such a role, the sound-ing must contribute to understanding and apprecia-tion of the fiction over and above the contributionmade thereto by the interpretation of the charactersupon which the expressive sounding is based. It mustbe in virtue of how the utterances sound when voicedin the head that some appreciation-relevant factabout the literary work is made manifest to the re-ceiver. Clearly there are cases where this is soforexample, the humorous dimensions of certain comiccharacters depend in this way upon how their utter-ances would sound. But in general it is unclear thatthis condition on artistic relevance will be satisfied.And, if we turn to the narrative elements in the story-telling, it is much more difficult to see how expressive

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sounding plays a part in the appreciation of thework, save where the sound of the words itself con-tributes to the works appreciable propertieswhereliterature performs certain more standardly poeticfunctions in virtue of the sounds of the text.

Second, and related, it is not clear that expressivesoundings of the narrative of a literary work medi-ate between interpretations of how the work goesand the appreciation of the work in a manner anal-ogous to the musical cases to which Kivy draws ourattention. The interpretation of a musical work, soKivy argues, both lies behind and is manifested inits performance, and this applies as much to perfor-mances in the head by score readers as to publicperformances. Kivy maintains, surely correctly, thatthe reasonably sophisticated reader of literary fic-tion also constructs, as she reads, an interpretationthat provides a way of making sense of the narrativeas a whole. Furthermore, we can speak of better orworse readings depending upon the readers inter-pretation. What is less clear is how the interpretationof the literary work, so conceived, is somehow man-ifest in the reading viewed as a sounding in thehead. Crucially, it is through its implications for howthe musical work sounds to the listenerincludingthe score readerthat the performers interpretationbears upon appreciation. But is a particular kind ofsounding in the head of the narrative of a literaryfiction equally a requirement for a proper apprecia-tion of that fiction? If so, Kivy owes us an account ofhow this is so.

Of course, all of these things are arguably crucialto our appreciation of poetry and of drama, whichis why we do routinely perform such works, evento ourselves, when we seek to appreciate them, andwhy the ability to sound such works is one that isfostered in literary education. But these considera-tions seem much more peripheral to appreciation ofthe novel. This concern is augmented given that, asnoted earlier, the reader is supposedly impersonat-ing the sounding of the narrative by the storyteller.This must, I think, be taken in terms of the contentfulintentions of the storyteller (author) rather than interms of her actual or hypothetical soundings. For,as readers of literary fictions, we rarely have a clearsense of how the author would have sounded the nar-rative of the story, nor does this ignorance present anobstacle to appreciation of the novel. And it is surelylikely that some great novelists were very bad readersof their own fictions. Rather, what matters for appre-ciation is that we grasp such things as the tone of thenarrativeis it playful, ironic, earnest, and so forth?But this seems to bear directly on how we under-stand the fiction, rather than bearing only indirectlythrough the properties of a soundinginformedby such an interpretative graspof that narrative inthe head of the silent reader.

Finally, consider again the ontological status of theliterary fiction. If, as Kivy assumes, literary texts are,like scores, notational characters for producing in-stances of works, and if the instances of literary worksare soundings, usually in the head of readers,what are the works themselves? For Kivy, it seems, lit-erary fictions like novels must be types of expressivesound sequences. But, as noted, whereas the sound-ing of a musical work is crucial to its appreciation, thesounding of a literary work seems to contribute to itsappreciation in much more limited ways. What seemscrucial to appreciation in the literary case is grasp-ing a structure of meanings embodied in a linguisticmedium, including both story meanings and thematicmeanings. But, in order to grasp the work as a struc-ture of meanings, the reader has to extract the rele-vant structure from the text before her, and this mayrequire a complex range of activities, at least some ofwhichrelating to direct quotation, for examplemay be thought of as soundings of elements in thework. Related activities might include exercises ofGregory Curries secondary imagination in orderto grasp certain psychological truths in the story. Soit may be important to think of silent readers as play-ing a role in realizing the work through their ac-tivity, which suggests that silent reading is in this re-spect more like score reading than like looking at apainting. Kivys compelling presentation of the casefor a performative element in literature may serve toawaken us to the significance of such aspects of liter-ary experience, even if, as I have suggested, the casefor viewing literature as a performance art requiresfurther argument and elucidation.

DAVID DAVIESDepartment of PhilosophyMcGill University

levitin, daniel j. This Is Your Brain on Music: TheScience of a Human Obsession. New York: Dutton,2006, 320 pp., $24.95 cloth, $15.00 paper.

This book is fun to read, regardless of whether youhave a philosophical interest in music. Daniel Levitinis a neuroscientist who studies music in the labora-tory, but he has also been a performer, a record pro-ducer, and a sound engineer, and he is knowledgeableabout a wide range of music, from rock and roll andbluegrass to classical and jazz. Although the book ti-tle suggests well learn a lot about the neuroscience ofmusic, in fact the actual results are relatively sparse.Levitin wisely insists that the neuroscience is onlyinteresting insofar as it explains the how and thewhy of mental functioning, and he devotes a lotof space to the cognitive psychology of music. Thebook is written in a chatty style with many anecdotes

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about his life and the famous people hes met whohave helped form his theoretical outlook. He alsogives mini-lectures on acoustics, the anatomy of thebrain, and evolutionary theory. Experts in these fieldswill no doubt quibble with some of his formulations.But overall this is a learned book, which wears itslearning lightly.

The book has nine chapters. The first two deal withthe basic elements of music. Levitin briefly definestone, pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loud-ness, spatial location, and reverberation, as well asthe higher-order concepts meter, key, melody, andharmony. Chapter 1 focuses on pitch, scales, and in-tervals, as well as timbre. Chapter 2 is mainly aboutrhythm, meter, tempo, and loudness. Levitin empha-sizes that music does not consist of its elements butof relations among them: Chapter 2 ends with a dis-cussion of grouping principles. Among other things,I learned that we distinguish two instruments (suchas oboe and trumpet) that are playing the same note(so with roughly the same overtones) by the fact thatthe two overtone series begin milliseconds apart, andthat our brains pick this up; and that Bach partitasgive the impression of two lines of music even whenthere is only one instrument playing by virtue of largefrequency differences that segregate sounds intoan upper and a lower stream. Throughout thebook there are innumerable fascinating insights likethese.

The third chapter is about music perception. Musi-cal activity involves nearly every region of the brainthat we know about, and nearly every neural sub-system (pp. 8384). The brain uses functional seg-regation for music processing and employs featuredetectors much as vision does. Levitin is particularlyinterested in the way that the brain fills in informa-tion that is not actually provided, for example whenit hears a melody as continuous even though it is ob-scured by another musical stream, or when a melodyemerges from a stream of rapidly played notes. Heclaims that music can be thought of as a type of per-ceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structureand order on a sequence of sounds (p. 107). Whetherthis is the most perspicuous way to put the point isdebatable; the properties detected in music may bemind dependent without being genuine illusions.

The most interesting aspect of Chapter 4 concernsthe connections between speech and music. Levitintells us that structural processingmusical syntaxhas been localized to the frontal lobes of both hemi-spheres in areas adjacent to and overlapping withthose regions that process speech syntax, such asBrocas area, and that regions associated with mu-sical semanticsassociating a tonal sequence withmeaningappear to be in the back portions of thetemporal lobe, near Wernickes area (p. 124). (Un-fortunately he doesnt say what he understands by

musical meaning.) But whereas speech is primar-ily found in the left hemisphere (although intonationand expressivity often reside on the right), music pro-cessing is found on both sides of the brain: processingof melodic shape is on the right, whereas the nam-ing aspects of music such as naming a song, a per-former, an instrument, or a musical interval happenon the left. Interestingly, Levitin says that [m]usicaltraining appears to have the effect of shifting somemusical processing from the right (imagistic) hemi-sphere to the left (logical) hemisphere, as musicianslearn to talk aboutand perhaps think aboutmusicusing linguistic terms (p. 123). I am reminded of Pe-ter Kivys idea that musical understanding requireslinguistic description, even if it is of a rudimentarysort. If Levitin is right, a whole lot of music processingand understanding goes on independently of naming.

The music system in the brain is functionally inde-pendent of the language system, but Levitin thinksit likely that music and language share some com-mon neural resources while also having independentpathways as well. The most interesting result he cites,I think, is from fMRI studies showing some overlap inareas for musical syntax and for syntax in language.Interestingly, the same left hemisphere regions areinvolved in both musical structure and in sign lan-guage used by the deaf. Levitin speculates that thereis perhaps a brain region that processes structure ingeneral, when that structure is conveyed over time(p. 127).

Chapter 5 is about memory and category forma-tion, and much of what it says is not specific to mu-sic. Any theory of memory has to be able to explainwhy we often seem to remember an abstract proto-type rather than fine details: for example, people arevery good at recognizing a melody thats been trans-formed in multiple ways. But on the other hand, Lev-itin has found that people remember fine details ofa particular performance of a song, including tempoand idiosyncratic stylistic features. Levitin cites Za-torres neuroimaging studies showing that what hecalls melodic calculation centers in the dorsal (up-per) temporal lobes seem to be attending to inter-val size and distances between pitches as we listento music, creating a pitch-free template of the verymelodic values we will need in order to recognizesongs in transposition (p. 160). His own studies haveshown that familiar music activates these regions aswell as the hippocampus, the seat of memory en-coding and retrieval. He concludes that we are stor-ing both the abstract and the specific information con-tained in melodies (p. 161). On the multiple-tracememory model he endorses, every experience leavesa memory trace, and if we come across the right con-textual cue, like Prousts madeleine, the memory willbe retrieved. How the theory explains the ability toremember prototypes is unclear to me.

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Perhaps the most interesting chapter is Chapter 6,subtitled Music, Emotion, and the Reptilian Brain.Levitin points out that we wouldnt notice and enjoythe subtle ways good musicians play with timing ina piece unless a computational system in the brainhas extracted information about when the beats aresupposed to occur (p. 168). The key to understand-ing this phenomenon is the cerebellum in the rep-tilian brain, which is involved with timing and coor-dinating body movements, but is also massively con-nected to emotional centers in the brain, notably theamygdala and the frontal lobes. Stimulation of dif-ferent regions of the cerebellum can produce rage(or sham rage) and calm. Interestingly, there areprojections from the inner ear not only to the audi-tory cortex but also directly to the cerebellum. Thissuggests that rhythm and meter can be emotionallyarousing in a direct way, which bypasses the cortex.Other interesting data have come from A. J. Bloodand R. J. Zatorre, who have studied the neural ac-companiments to thrills and chills in response tomusic and have found activation in areas associatedwith the brains reward system, the ventral striatum(including the nucleus accumbens), the amygdala,the midbrain, and regions of the frontal cortex (seep. 185).

Through a mathematical technique that Levitindoes not explainfunctional and effective connec-tivity analysis (p. 186)he infers that the followingsequence of activations occur in music listening: firstthe auditory cortex processes the various componentsof sound, then the frontal regions process musicalstructure and expectations, and then the mesolim-bic system, which is involved in arousal, pleasure,and the transmission of opioids and the productionof dopamine, is activated, culminating in activationin the nucleus accumbens (p. 187). Throughout thereis activity in the cerebellum and basal ganglia, pre-sumably supporting the processing of rhythm and me-ter (p. 187). Levitin comments that this process goesfar toward explaining how music can improve peo-ples moods. The brain, he says, takes satisfactionin matching a mental beat with the real one, and itenjoys violations of expectation.

Levitin confines his attention to the pleasure weget from music and especially the pleasure we getfrom purely musical aspects of music. He says noth-ing about expression and expressiveness, and evenin the discussion of rhythm he doesnt clearly distin-guish between being emotionally aroused by rhythmor meter and taking pleasure in departures from ex-pected rhythms and meters. Moreover, it is not clearwhy we take pleasure in the unexpected rather thanfear it. Levitin also notes that there is an auditorysubsystem that responds very fast to changes in theenvironment, such as a sudden loud sound, since suchchanges are potentially dangerous. He says that we

know that music isnt threatening and thats why ourcognitive system interprets the violations of expec-tation in music as a source of pleasure and amuse-ment (p. 188). But at most, one might think, thisexplains why such violations bring relief; it doesntexplain why they should give us positive pleasure.

Chapter 7 discusses what makes an expert musi-cian. Its conclusions are somewhat banal, and manyof the conclusions it draws are not peculiar to music:for example, apparently ten thousand hours of prac-tice are required to become an expert in any field.Chapter 8 on why we like the music we like also comesto unsurprising conclusions: schemata for genres andstyles of music heard in childhood tend to dictate whatwe listen to in later life, and musical preferences areheavily influenced by social factors such as what ourgroup listens to.

The final chapter, The Music Instinct, however,has perhaps the most interesting sustained argumentin the book. It is an attempt to rebut Stephen Pinkershypothesis that music is a spandrel of language, thatis, that language is a genuine adaptation but that mu-sic is just a by-product of language. It may also bea by-product of other genuine adaptations, such asresponding to emotional signals in the human voice(alert calls, cooing to a baby, and so forth) and havinga motor control system that uses rhythm to coordi-nate bodily movements. Levitin emphasizes Pinkersremark that music is auditory cheesecake, in thesense that we evolved to like fats and sugars, and ourliking for cheesecake is just a consequence of thismore general liking. Its inappropriate for Levitin tostress this analogy in the way he does, however, sincemusic is supposed to be a spandrel of language andlanguage is not primarily a source of pleasure.

Levitin wants to argue that music is more impor-tant than a mere spandrel. He suggests three ways ofdefending the idea that music evolved as a system inits own right. First there is Darwins suggestion thatmusic evolved to play a role in sexual selection. InDarwins words, music was acquired for the sake ofcharming the opposite sex, like the peacocks tail(p. 245). Levitin suggests that it may indicate biolog-ical and sexual fitness: the ability to sing and dancesignifies good health and fitness, and it also shows thatone has plenty of spare time, thus indicating that onehas already taken care of basic needs. To illustratethese somewhat dubious points, Levitin anachronis-tically cites contemporary practices like the love lifeof rock stars and the wearing of bling!

A second possibility is that music evolved as adevice for social bonding and cohesion (p. 252).Collective music making may encourage social co-hesion and promote group togetherness. Here aselsewhere, he draws on the evidence from Williamssyndrome, a syndrome in which sociability and emo-tionality are linked with musicality, but also with

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severe intellectual deficits. Interestingly, he contrastsWilliams syndrome patients with those with autismspectrum disorders (ASD), who have difficulty em-pathizing with others and understanding others emo-tions, and who also seem to be unable to be moved bymusic. Apparently the neocerebellum is larger thannormal in Williams syndrome and smaller than nor-mal in ASD.

Third, music might have evolved because itpromoted cognitive development, and it could bethe activity that prepared our pre-human ancestorsfor speech communication, and for the . . . cogni-tive . . . flexibility necessary to become humans (p.254). Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are cited assupporters of this view.

Against Pinker, Levitin argues that music has beenaround for a very long time. Musical instrumentsare among the oldest artifacts on record. There isno tangible evidence that language preceded mu-sic, according to Levitin, and the physical evidencesuggests the contrary. . . . The archaeological recordshows an uninterrupted record of music making ev-erywhere we find humans, and in every era (p. 250).But this is a poor argument: if music is a spandrelof language, then presumably it evolved at the sametime. Moreover, its unfair to demand evidence ofspeech in the early archaeological record: that flutesantedate writing does not mean that music antedatesspeech.

Second, Levitin points out that if music was non-adaptive, then music lovers should be at some evolu-tionary or survival disadvantage (p. 249). But Pinkerapparently does not say that music is positively non-adaptive; its just a spandrel. Some spandrels haveturned out to be useful for other purposes.

Third, Levitin repeatedly emphasizes that almosteveryone listens to and enjoys music; the modernWestern concept of the musical expert has led us tolose sight of this fact. But if music is a spandrel of lan-guage, then it would not be surprising that musicalability is a general human competence.

So far none of these arguments seems to me com-pelling. The best argument against Pinker may bethe fact that, as Levitin has shown in earlier chap-ters, there are dedicated brain systems for music andfor language, and although there are connections be-tween them, they are very different. This suggests thatmusic evolved separately from language. Of course itleaves the question of priority open. As for the rivaltheories Levitin canvasses, they are all speculative,and there is no knock-down argument in favor of anyone of them.

If I have any general complaint about the book,it is that it is sometimes hard to follow the argumentand to figure out what the main point of a chapteris. Levitin is clearly more concerned to maintain theaverage readers interest than to present a carefully

honed argument. This is sometimes frustrating to aphilosopher. But the book is great fun and full ofinteresting information, including some about neu-roscience. It also nicely conveys the excitement of afield that is just beginning to make important discov-eries.

JENEFER ROBINSONDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Cincinnati

goldman, alvin. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy,Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Ox-ford University Press, 2006, 364 pp., $35.00 cloth.

Over the past several decades, philosophers, psychol-ogists, and neuroscientists have paid increasing atten-tion to questions about mindreading, the processthrough which we come to understand and predictothers thoughts, emotions, and desires. The domi-nant explanation for mindreading in philosophy andpsychology has been theory theory, which states thatpeople make mental state attributions on the basis ofa nave theory or a theory-like body of information.In the 1980s simulation theory emerged as an alterna-tive explanation, according to which we understanda target individuals mental states by attempting toundergo a similar mental process ourselves. In spiteof the intuitive plausibility and explanatory powerof simulation theory, theory theory has remained thedominant view. Alvin Goldmans new book shouldchange that.

Goldman employs an interdisciplinary approachthat draws extensively on empirical research indevelopmental psychology, social psychology, andcognitive neuroscience. In addition to providing theclearest and most compelling account of simulationtheory to date, the book demonstrates why philoso-phers have a great deal to contribute to the science ofthe mind. This is because Goldman does more thancite various studies that support his view; he criticallyanalyzes and systematizes the empirical findings frommultiple disciplines, thereby providing an organizingframework that reveals the relevance of individualstudies to broader philosophical and psychologicalissues.

This is all fine and good, but what does it haveto do with aesthetics? Soon after simulation theorywas introduced, aestheticians (Gregory Currie, Su-san Feagin, and Kendall Walton to name just a few)began using and refining the concept of simulation tounderstand how we engage with works of art. Cur-rie and Shaun Nichols are two of the major playersin the mindreading debate. Both also work in aes-thetics. And simulation is relevant to a broad rangeof topics in aesthetics, including those that involvethe imagination, pretense, character identification,

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narrative, and emotional reactions to art. Goldmanhimself briefly considers the relevance of simulationto aesthetics at the end of the book, but even if hedid not, the book would still be required reading foraestheticians interested in questions regarding the re-lationship between art and the mind.

The first few chapters of the book set the stageby providing a conceptual overview of the mindread-ing debate and establishing the relevant theoreticalconstruct of simulation. Goldman elaborates on hisearlier view of mental simulation, expanding the cat-egory in light of recent empirical findings. Severalfeatures of this updated account are worth mention-ing. First, both successful and attempted simulationsnow qualify as simulation. Second, this is a hybridtheory of simulation, which means that it allows fortheorizing to play a role in mindreading tasks. It isstill labeled simulation theory because of the essentialrole it assigns simulation and its emphasis on simula-tion routines. Goldman has been a hybrid theorist forsome time, yet many of his critics seem to forget this.Third, this is a duplex theory of simulation that char-acterizes two different types of simulation-based pro-cesses. There are low-level simulations, which involvea type of direct mirroring or resonance and do not re-quire pretense, and high-level simulations, which nec-essarily involve pretense or enactment imaginationand target more complex mental states. Althoughthese two processes rely on different mechanisms andoperate in very different ways, Goldman shows thatthey are significantly similar and should both fall un-der the category of simulation, which is natural andtheoretically interesting.

In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Goldman develops per-suasive arguments against some of the leading al-ternative theories of mindreading. Chapter 3 focuseson rationality theory, Chapter 4 on the child as sci-entist theory, and Chapter 5 on modularity theory.These chapters will probably be of the least inter-est to aestheticians. They primarily function to clearthe way for the elaboration and defense of simula-tion theory that is developed in the rest of the book.This is not the only place, however, where Gold-man addresses the opponents of simulation theory.Almost every chapter in the book has some discus-sion of the rival accounts. The majority of Goldmansarguments against these accounts are successful, es-pecially those he puts forth in Chapters 3, 4, and 5,but he occasionally seems to overemphasize the dif-ferences between his view and the views of theorytheory hybrid theorists such as Nichols and StephenStich, whose book Mindreading: An Integrated Ac-count of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and UnderstandingOther Minds (Oxford University Press, 2003) devel-ops a convincing hybrid account. Nichols and Stichgrant that simulation plays a role in mindreading,albeit a far less significant one than Goldman pro-

poses, yet Goldman sometimes seems to suggest thatany empirical support in favor of simulation makessuch accounts untenable. This cannot be right, giventhat those who hold a hybrid version of theory the-ory do not deny that simulation is part of the min-dreading story. I am not suggesting that there is asstrong a case to be made for a hybrid theory theory asthere is for a hybrid simulation theory. The evidenceGoldman marshals throughout this book shows thatthere is not. Nevertheless, some of Goldmans cri-tiques seem to gloss over the extent to which someof the rival accounts make room for simulationalprocesses.

In Chapters 6 through 8, Goldman continues to ex-pand and refine his earlier formulation of simulationtheory on the basis of a broad range of empirical stud-ies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Gold-mans treatment of the empirical evidence in thesechapters is exemplary. He is spectacularly well in-formed about the relevant science. He takes noth-ing for granted and scrutinizes numerous individualstudies and the conclusions drawn by the empiricalscientists. He acknowledges when the findings are in-conclusive and points out when they create problemsfor his view. A less conscientious philosopher wouldmake much bolder claims on the basis of far less. It isno wonder that leading neuroscientists and psychol-ogists have sought Goldmans collaboration in thestudy of mirroring processes.

Chapter 6 focuses on low-level mindreading, atype of mirroring process that is relatively primitive,automatic, and largely outside of consciousness, andthat is used to mindread emotions, pain, and simpleintentions. This is one of the most important chaptersin the book. It details extensive empirical support forsimulation theory, including recent empirical findingson mirror neurons, which are changing the way we un-derstand human sociality. It also breaks new groundin the mindreading debate, which has focused almostexclusively on high-level mindreading, by reconcep-tualizing the notions of mindreading and simulationto include automatic mirroring processes that playa fundamental role in our social engagements andunderstanding yet have gone virtually ignored in thephilosophical literature. Goldman shows how the sig-nificant body of empirical research on mirror systemscan and should be brought to bear on questions aboutthe nature of mentalizing.

Interestingly, although philosophers of mind havefor the most part neglected the type of mirroring pro-cesses Goldman discusses, several aestheticians haveaddressed their role in eliciting emotional responsesto art, including Noel Carroll, Stephen Davies, CarlPlantinga, Jenefer Robinson, Murray Smith, and me.There is a history of aestheticians making signif-icant contributions to the study of processes re-lated to simulation, and of philosophers of mind and

96 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

emotion who take such processes seriously using ourengagement with art to help understand how theseprocesses operate. For example, the German psychol-ogist Theodor Lipps, best known for his work in aes-thetics, was one of the first to utilize the concept ofempathy, which he used to refer to a process of pro-jecting oneself into an object of perception.

Returning to Goldmans book, the strongestevidence for simulation-based mindreading comesfrom findings on face-based emotion recognition(FaBER). Deficits in the experience of particularemotions (so far, there is strong evidence on fear, dis-gust, and anger) have been shown to co-occur withdeficits in the face-based recognition of the sameemotions. Goldman convincingly argues that thesepaired deficits appear to reveal a systematic, func-tional relationship between emotion experience andemotion attribution (p. 119). This is precisely whatsimulation theory predicts. A hybrid version of the-ory theory might be able to account for this, but thedata leave little room for accounts of mindreadingthat do not give simulation a central role to play.

Chapter 7 turns to high-level mindreading, thetype typically discussed in the literature. High-levelmindreading is a process involving pretense or En-actment imagination (E imagination), which differsfrom mere supposition and has one or more of thefollowing features: it targets mental states such aspropositional attitudes, which are relatively complex;it includes components that are subject to volun-tary control; and it is accessible to consciousness. AsGoldman acknowledges, the evidence for simulation-based high-level mindreading is not as substantial asthe evidence for low-level mindreading, but it is stillhighly significant.

Especially persuasive is Goldmans discussion ofegocentrism and projection. It is well established thatpeople are frequently subject to egocentric biaseswhen they attempt to mindread others, which leads toinaccurate attributions. Simulation theory can easilyexplain this phenomenon as a kind of quarantine vio-lation. When an attributor fails to bracket (or quaran-tine) his or her own genuine nonpretend states, thosestates become inappropriate inputs to the simulationroutine, contaminating the process. Goldman exam-ines evidence for egocentric biases in attributions ofknowledge, valuations, and feelings, showing that allthree types are easily handled by a simulation theoryof mindreading. It is difficult to imagine how alterna-tive theories would account for these errors.

Chapter 8 reviews empirical research on an evenbroader range of topics, including developmentalfindings, work on autism and control theory, a dualprocess theory of empathy, and the possible evolu-tionary roots of simulation. Many of the studies an-alyzed in this chapter are less conclusive than thosediscussed in the preceding chapters. Goldman makes

a convincing case that however tentative it may be,this evidence is instructive when considered in con-junction with the evidence offered in the earlier chap-ters.

Chapters 9 and 10 concern introspection and its re-lationship to self-attribution and mental concepts. InChapter 9, Goldman defends a special method viewof first-person mindreading, according to which theself-ascription of mental states occurs via a processof introspection, inner sense or self-monitoring,that is modeled on perceptual processes. This view ex-plains how attributors classify their own mental statesas belonging to certain categories. Although most dis-cussions of mindreading concentrate on third-personattribution, a comprehensive simulation theory mustsay something about self-attribution since attributorsclassify the mental states of others based on their clas-sifications of their own states. The view on offer hereis controversial, which is why Goldman carefully con-siders and addresses potential objections and distin-guishes his version of the special method view fromother recent variants.

Chapter 10 takes off from Chapter 9 to answerquestions about the nature of mental concepts. Gold-man claims that mental concepts are constitutedin part by introspection-derived mental representa-tions, proposing that an introspective code is em-ployed in the representation of mental categories andthe classification of mental state tokens. AlthoughChapters 9 and 10 address key issues in philosophy ofmind and are important for distinguishing Goldmansaccount of mindreading, they may have minimal in-terest for aestheticians who are not also interested inphilosophy of mind or epistemology.

In the final chapter of the book, Goldman con-siders various applications of simulation theory. It ishere that issues in aesthetics are dealt with explicitly,though the chapter also includes discussions of therelevance of simulation and our simulational propen-sities to questions regarding the nature of human so-ciality and moral theory. The sections on aesthetics inthis chapter cover some of the same ground as Gold-mans essay Imagination and Simulation in Audi-ence Responses to Fiction, which appears along withseveral other essays on or directly related to issuesin aesthetics in The Architecture of the Imagination:New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction (ed.Shaun Nichols, Oxford University Press, 2006). Thediscussion in this chapter, however, is broader.

Goldman considers two important topics in aes-thetics: fiction and enactment imagination, and sim-ulation and fiction. Regarding the former, he chal-lenges Shaun Nicholss approach to understandingour engagement with fiction, arguing that it supportssuppositional imagination and not enactment imag-ination, and raising doubts about whether a single-code theory of pretense and belief representations

Book Reviews 97

can explain our emotional reactions to fiction. Gold-man agrees with Nichols that pretense representa-tions elicit mental states that are very similar to thegenuine states they mimic but claims that these arebetter explained by enactment imagination, whichhas as its aim the production of states that replicategenuine states.

He then moves on to consider some of the issuesthat have been raised about the role of simulationin our involvement with fiction. Beginning with theparadox of fiction, Goldman disputes the claim thatwe do not have genuine emotional responses to fic-tion. Taking an approach similar to that of JeneferRobinson, he rejects the judgmentalist (or cognitive)theory of emotion, which makes belief an essentialcomponent of all emotions. The basis of this rejectionis empirical, namely, the findings discussed in Chap-ter 6 on emotional contagion and FaBER. Althoughwork has already begun on the relevance to aesthet-ics of this research on mirroring, including work byGoldman, there is still much more to do. As we learnmore about the mechanisms involved in transmittingemotions, our understanding of why and how we re-act to fictions will increase.

After concluding that our emotional responses tofiction are genuine, Goldman considers simulation(or empathy) as explanations for them. He first ex-amines Noel Carrolls arguments for rejecting theview that our emotional responses to characters arebased on perspective taking or simulation. Althoughhe says that Carroll has good reasons for his position,he claims that there are other reasons for thinkingsimulation plays a role in our involvement with fic-tion. Drawing on Curries account, he explains thatwe can simulate a hypothetical observer (or reader)of fact who experiences the narrative events as facts.This does not mean we cannot also simulate charac-ters perspectives. We can, and there is a growing bodyof empirical research suggesting that we do. If bothtypes of simulation occur, then Carrolls concerns canbe addressed.

The final section of the chapter on aesthetics com-prises Goldmans responses to Matthew Kierans ob-jections to the simulation theory of fictional engage-ment. He characterizes Kierans construal of simula-tion theory as unnecessarily strong, since few if anysimulation theorists claim that simulation is neededfor understanding characters or that simulation is theonly mode of engagement with fictions. Goldmanthen challenges Kierans grounds for claiming thatreaders acquire deep and sophisticated understand-ing of narratives without simulation and argues thatthe question of whether a process of simulation orone involving inference is at work is not one that canbe answered through armchair theorizing.

Goldmans treatment of topics in aestheticsdemonstrates why aestheticians should read this

book. Issues and research in philosophy of mind haveimportant implications for the philosophy of art, andaestheticians, particularly those who are empiricallyminded, cannot afford to ignore this literature. Gold-man has already performed the enormous task of re-fining and systematizing a huge amount of data andrevealing its relevance to various problems and de-bates in philosophy and psychology. He has also be-gun to draw connections between this research andproblems in philosophy of art.

AMY COPLANDepartment of PhilosophyCalifornia State UniversityFullerton

joselit, david. Feedback: Television against Democ-racy. MIT Press, 2007, xvi + 214 pp., 53 b&w illus.,$19.95 cloth.

Histories of video art often begin with studies of NamJune Paiks disruptions of the conventions of televi-sion viewing in order to establish that video is nottelevision, and then go on to address video art in arthistorical categories, as if the disciplinary complica-tions entailed by videobetween art, pop culture,technology, and mass communicationhad been ef-fectively neutralized. In Feedback: Television againstDemocracy, David Joselit adopts a contrary tack. Heseizes upon the complicated nature of video, as botha fine art and a commercial mass media, to examinethe politics of aesthetics. And he takes the work ofearly video artists, including Paik, Andy Warhol, JoanJonas, and others, as the point of departure for crit-ically engaging television and rethinking art historyas a resource for activism.

What interests me most about Joselits study isthe formulation of his problem and the methodol-ogy he develops to address it. Joselit brings togetherthe art historical dilemmas presented by the amor-phous pluralism of contemporary art and the con-fused state of politics since 1989, in which there seemsto be no remaining vantage point from which to cri-tique the institutions of capitalism and liberal democ-racy. Art historians, he contends, too often still relyon Marxist categories inherited from the FrankfurtSchool to explain the significance of artworks inquasi-revolutionary terms. Instead he take(s) it asaxiomatic that there is no longer a position outsidecapitalism in the United States, and that under suchconditions, facile revolutionary claims for art (not tomention television) are little more than posing (p.30). Whether one entirely concedes the exhaustionof Marxist critical theory or not, Joselits argumentfinds further support in contemporary art. In its het-erogeneity, the work of artists no longer stands strictlyopposed to products of the culture industry. By

98 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

bringing televisions into the gallery, Paik not only el-evated video to an art form, but he also corrupted thefield of art with the paradigmatic consumer technol-ogy. And Warhol not only painted soup can labels butalso lent his talents to produce television commercialsand his name to endorse consumer goods. Not onlyis there no longer a clearly defined social horizon forresistance to capitalism, but also it may be no longerpossible even to imagine a world altogether beyondthe demands of commodity exchange.

Joselit contends that this calls for a novel criticaltheory that would be both more true to the placeof art in contemporary society and, in this honesty,reinvigorate the political possibilities articulated byartworks. Against the Frankfurt Schools concept ofreification, which, he contends, reduces the com-modity form to an absolute stasis, he draws upon theworks of Paul Virillo, Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadu-rai, and others to argue that the politics of contem-porary culture would be better understood in termsof the tension between commodities and networks. Heoffers a synopsis of the structure of broadcast tele-vision in which he outlines the mutual implicationof the two and argues that, while commodities co-alesce networks (of information and social relation-ships) in apparently fixed objects, their coimplicationalso presents the contrary possibility, that is, to dis-solve commodities into the networks they otherwisestabilize. In the process, the commodity form wouldbe not altogether overcome, but objects might be setin motion along new trajectories and infused withnovel social significances.

At the same time, Joselit works to surmount con-temporary disciplinary disputes between art historyand the emerging field of visual culture, in which con-ventional, formal analyses of artistic productions aresuspended in favor of considerations of commercialartifacts, new technologies, and modes of aestheticconsumption. He contends the terms in these debatesare too fixed and proposes to move beyond the oppo-sition, central to them, between fine and commercialart, by reconceiving the distinction between mediumand media. Rather than the material substrate of art-work, Joselit follows Rosalind Krauss in thinking ofmedium in terms of the recursive, self-limiting con-ditions of cultural practices. And to define media,he appeals to Marshall McLuhans concept of ra-tio, as the dialectical effect that distinct technolo-gies have on one another. Rather than simply dis-tinguished, for Joselit, medium and media addressthe dynamics of inner and outer direction, which playcomplimentary roles in constituting the practices, au-diences, and institutional frameworks of diverse phe-nomena. And he brings them together in his centralconcept, feedback, which he explains as the figurethat arises from the interaction between medium andmedia.

Joselit conceives history on the model of tele-vision technology as a scanned image whose ap-parent stasis is in constant motiona fabric thatat every moment is being undone and replenished(p. 63). Accordingly, historical changes take placenot through revolutions along a teleological path, butthrough interferences in the play of presence and ab-sence that constitutes experience. And diverse fieldsdo not stand simply segregated from one another,but help define one another through the dynamics oftheir interactions. He explains his art historical ap-proach as an eco-formalism, in which the studyof discrete images gives way to considerations ofwhole ecologies as the fundamental units of analy-sis; and yet the formal concerns of art history arenot abandoned in favor of what would ultimatelyamount to sociology. Instead, he studies artworksalongside other cultural productions as disruptions,which resonate throughout these broader ecologies,by (re)defining the fundamental dynamics of fig-ure and ground that structure them as fields. Art,he contends, stands against television as figurestands against ground, and television, in its privati-zation of public speech . . . stands against democracy(p. xi). Completing the hermeneutical circle, he thenconcludes: in this era of politics conducted largelythrough media icons, democracy stands against thebackground provided by art.

Joselits interdisciplinary approach fills his bookwith analyses of richly diverse phenomena, whichprovide provocative compliments to one another andtogether articulate aesthetic strategies for social andpolitical change in ontological terms. Feedback is, forJoselit, a figure not only for aesthetic form but fur-thermore for politically sovereign subjectivity itself .His interest in television as an impediment to democ-racy concerns not the limited distortions it producesin the already established, empirical field of politics,as one might find in a piece of more conventionalpolitical science, but its role in constituting identi-ties and communities as such. And he explores thework of artists not merely as potentially applicable toactivism, but as the articulation of subject positionsfundamental to social and political life.

By transforming standard broadcast images intoswirling colored lines, and constructing raging, over-saturated montages on walls of televisions, Joselitcontends Paik reversed the dynamics of figure andground in the structure of television viewing and notonly revealed new dimensions of the visual field, butalso disrupted the nature of objectivity at its veryroots (p. 50). In this way, Joselit explains Paiksvideo-works as inheritors of the ontologically desta-bilizing project inaugurated by Duchamps ready-mades. But he also connects Paiks work to 1960scounterculture and invests it with explicit social sig-nificance. He compares Paiks videos to the ecstasies

Book Reviews 99

of psychedelic drugs, ties his techniques to the exis-tential, political, street theater of Haight-AshburysThe Diggers, and traces a broader map of experi-ments in transforming social consciousness with ex-panded media, through work by Ken Kesey, StanBrakhage, and others.

Similarly, Joselit argues that pieces by Bruce Nau-man, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, and Peter Campustear figure and ground out of alignment and renderthe video image conspicuous as a construct. The ef-fect, he argues, is not a self-conscious opening ontoreality, but rather the liberation of the image as a vehi-cle for forming identitiesas a process, not a televi-sual presence (p. 163). And he takes issue with Ros-alind Krausss now classical argument that video isfundamentally narcissistic. Instead, Joselit contends,videos medium is community, insofar as it consti-tutes the collective identities that provide the foun-dation for social formations (p. 105). On this ba-sis, he provocatively explores Abby Hoffmans andAndy Warhols respective engagements with mediacelebrity and follows Huey Newtons lead in tracingthe figures of political agency in a film by Melvin VanPeebles. By engaging and articulating media identi-ties, Joselit contends these three, in their distinct ways,were engaged in community building.

Joselits writing is lucid, and he works out a re-markably cohesive theory of art history and the pol-itics of aesthetics. The only significant problems Ifind with his book concern the substance of the mat-ter and my ultimate disagreement with the idealismof his position. If Frankfurt School Marxists recog-nized the importance of culture in constituting so-cial formations, rather than dismissing it merely asan epiphenomenal superstructure determined by amaterial base, Joselit does away with considerationsof material bases altogether. To speak in this way ofideal and material phenomena is perhaps to main-tain the kind of theoretical distinction that Joselitgenerally works to dissolve, but, in his appeal toimage and information networks, he decidedly col-lapses the opposition in favor of one of its terms.To his credit, Joselit acknowledges the need to con-sider the investments that inform distinct artworksand cultural practices; but this is the one promise ofhis methodology on which he does not make good.He examines the structures of images, without refer-ence to the social, psychological, and economic forcesthat produce them and sustain their enjoyment. So,while I found his analyses generally compelling, hedid an injustice to political groups like the BlackPanthers by treating them almost exclusively as me-dia activists (p. 144), and he claimed too much forthe authority of images by arguing that they them-selves constitute subject positions and communities,rather than merely playing an essential role in theprocess.

Joselits study also verges on abandoning criticalpraxis in favor of speculative synthesis. He employshis interdisciplinary strategies almost exclusively forthe sake of comparison, without working out the dis-junctions necessary to define the objects in question.For example, when he relates Paiks video to 1960scounterculture, he never questions whether counter-culture is a politically potent force, whether it is in factprogressive, or whether it is an instrument and effectof dominant institutions. What about the contrary ex-ample provided by the merging of artists video andcounterculture with the development of MTV in the1980s? Did this not instead mark a further refinementin the commodity form, as popular songs were re-duced to soundtracks for their own advertisements?And what about contrary examples from the historyof video art? In the end, Joselit offers fairly con-ventional readings of canonical, early, artists video,which indeed maintained a dissonant opposition tomass culture. But has it continued to maintain this dis-sonance, as it has emerged as a predominant art form?To the contrary, does not much video artincludingwork by Pipilotti Rist and Mathew Barneyfurtherextend the spectacles of consumer culture into themuseum? The tendency to relinquish critique in favorof speculative synthesis may be a danger in interdis-ciplinary studies, insofar as they might seem to allowone to shift focus before establishing the intradisci-plinary contrasts that would give an object concretedeterminacy. But, in the context of Joselits study, itseems more like a further effect of his idealism. Whenone supposes that artists and activists can cause apublic to flash into being with feedback (p. 131), thesuccess, failure, and actual character of those publicscease to be concerns. And the critic is free to map anopen-ended field of possible analogues.

In the end, I wonder how one might take intoconsideration the role of material conflict in socialformations and avoid these speculative tendencieswithout thereby compromising the significant accom-plishments of Joselits excellent book.

CLARK BUCKNERSchool for Interdisciplinary StudiesSan Francisco Art Institute

benson, stephen. Literary Music: Writing Music inContemporary Fiction. Burlington, VT: Ashgate,2006, vii + 175 pp., $89.95 cloth.

Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fic-tion joins the sizable population of studies of therelationships between music and literature. It stud-ies representations of music within fictional litera-ture, taking off from certain assumptions about thestructural and ontological elements shared in the

100 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

interaction between two cultural forms (p. 4). Itsprime purpose is to extrapolate from its various casestudies a sense of the ways in which literature can besaid to be musical.

In the introduction, Music for Reading, StephenBenson defines his titular term as follows: literarymusic refers in the first instance to the self-evidentfact that such music [as written about in literature]is by definition literary, a music made by the nar-rative in which it occurs (p. 4). The interest is intreating representations of music within fictional lit-erature as primary evidence rather than historicaldetritus (p. 4), and to progress beyond unhelpful no-tions of music as cipher, supplement (p. 13), adjec-tival icing, corroborating sound, cap (p. 14), asmerely a realization of a non-musical narrative un-derpinning (p. 70). The point is to argue, or at leastprovide evidence for the case, against the notion thatlanguage in literature frequently speaks about mu-sic . . . but music is not felt to speak about literature(p. 13).

The key to literary music, then, is not the suc-cess or otherwise of the evocation, but the nature ofthe performance: the question of how and why musicis staged [in the fiction], and to what desired end(p. 4). The question is less about what music meanson its own and more about what it does in certainliterary contexts. This, the Janus-headed dynamic ofliterary musicthe work of music within literatureand the work of literature in staging musicis thecore of Bensons thesis. The writing of such musicin contemporary fiction is not only a matter of recep-tion history; it serves also as one arena in which wecan witness the cultural work to which music is put(p. 7). Benson places some emphasis on the work in-volved in joining, or at least juxtaposing, musical andliterary acts, and to this extent the title could alsobe through (p. 38 n. 45) or into fiction, sincethe focus is on the active passage from the one tothe other, on their dynamic interaction (this is par-ticularly evident in the chapter on Maurice Blanchot,whose thematics are particularly suited to these pur-poses). Hence Benson argues, like Lawrence Kramer(a frequent methodological presence in Literary Mu-sic), that all writing about music seeks to make mu-sic known and so becomes part of that musics meansand mode of existence (p. 5). Within this criticalcontext, fictional representations serve as one moreperformance, one more instance of music making (inboth senses of the term) (p. 5).

In Chapter 1 Benson considers how the novelistJames Hamilton-Paterson engages in Gerontius withthe cultural phenomenon of the English composerEdward Elgar. The focus of Bensons engagementis the musical figure of melody, the intention beingto confront the subject with a real presence (Ben-son mentions George Steiner in a later chapter), as

opposed to the fictional music conventionally con-sidered by the literary camp within music-literaturestudies.

Focusing in particular on the opening motto themefrom Elgars First Symphony, which is famous for ap-pearing pretty much fully formed on its first occur-rence, Bensons analysis leads him from music to cul-ture, and to the remark, quoting Kramer, that [t]hemelody arises where whatever subject enunciates ithas departed, or may depart, or will have departed,and arises, moreover, imbued with both the pathos ofthis departure and its mitigation (p. 39; the quotedpassage is from Musical Meaning: Toward a Criti-cal History). Indeed, Bensons broader cultural ar-gument is that the symphony is too confident in itsown presence (p. 39), and not ironic and ambiguousenough, since a sense of its own authenticity is al-ways on hand. This idea would bear comparison withthemes in the Elgar anniversary celebrations, duringwhich, on the one hand, the relation of the composer-as-English-icon to the subjects of the realm and, onthe other hand, the tangled relationship Elgar hadwith modernism, are being rethought in new politicaland demographic contexts. Benson notes, correctly,that in the symphony the melodic voice [is] the mas-ter sound of authenticity itself, yet it is a voice at onceover-emphatically near and, in its yearning, nagginglydistanced. Its affective intimacy is not entirely com-forting (p. 39).

Chapter 2 considers the musical engagement withRudyard Kipling in Michael Berkeley and DavidMaloufs opera Baa Baa Black Sheep (1993). The fo-cus is the libretto, and the chapters work begins withthe familiar observation that libretto texts tend to bepredicated on a prior understanding of the conditionof music to which they are destined and to be con-ceived as the below-stairs facilitator of the real mu-sical life of the multimedia work of opera properatext to be heard but not noticed.

Methodologically and aesthetically, Benson makesthe interesting suggestion that the work going on inoperatic setups like this takes place at the borderbetween the libretto as literature and the libretto asmusical fodder (pp. 59, 76); between prose and verse(p. 60); between text as central and as supplemen-tal; between, one might add, Wagner and Stravin-sky, paradigm cases of these ideological positions.This ideas application is broader than opera. Ben-son draws on Gerard Genette and Peter Kivy forsupport, following Genette (Paratexts: Thresholds ofInterpretation [Cambridge University Press, 1997]) inthe idea that [m]ore than a boundary or a sealedborder, the paratext is, rather, a threshold . . . an un-defined zone between the inside and the outside (p.66 n. 54), and Kivys belief (Introduction to a Philos-ophy of Music [Oxford University Press, 2002]) thatlistening to absolute music is, among other things,

Book Reviews 101

the experience of going from our world, with all of itstrials, tribulations, and ambiguities, to another world,a world of pure sonic structure, that, because it neednot be interpreted as a representation or descriptionof our world, but can be appreciated on its own termsalone, gives us the sense of liberation that I havefound appropriate to analogize with the pleasurableexperience we get in the process of going from a stateof intense pain to its cessation (quoted twice, pp. 123,156). For Benson these two otherwise quite differenttexts come together at the threshold over whichmusic becomes literature becomes music in a contin-ual process of going from one place to another.These movements are indicators of the important roleplayed by links, bridges, and passages (p. 6, see alsopp. 25, 33, 71, 77, 87, 141, 148) between music andliterature in literary musiceven when passagesare thwarted (p. 96) or become a Sisyphian labor.Elsewhere, too, Benson notes the importance of thismovement between music and text: We pass therebyfrom the felt immediacy of the musical experience tothe seeming inadequacy of our ability to put that ex-perience into words (p. 1). This otherwise tangentialremark on an aspect of Bensons methodology sug-gests one reason why Blanchototherwise a slightlyodd bedfellow in this bookhas a vital role in theargument: his work, drawn alongside that of FranzKafka and Samuel Beckett, presents a limiting caseof the passage-as-waiting where music in literatureliterary musicnever arrives but is constantly on theverge of doing so.

Chapters 3 and 4 turn to narrative theory, begin-ning with the idea that, although voice in literarynarrative is a metaphor we live by (p. 103), littleattention [has] been paid to the work of polyphonyas metaphor, to the non-literary discursive sphereit implicates, as opposed to the concept that it pas-sively enables (p. 70). Bensons argument turns ona frequent problem with narrative readings of mu-sical works, namely that they ignore the question ofwhether music is already implicated within the nar-rative theory: whether narrative theory has alreadyneeded to perform its own idea of musicto have al-ready read music (p. 70)as a means of setting out itsmethodology. This is an argument about bootstraps.

Chapter 3 considers Bakhtins concept ofpolyphony and compares it with Milan Kunderas the-ory of the novel. Kundera, it transpires, is more willingthan Bakhtin to allow the idea of a musical influenceon the form and content of novelistic narrative, whilefor Bakhtin and Blanchot music enters through thefigure of the voice, which in turn brings with it no-tions of sound. Sound, of course, even though it isnever transparent but always mediated and, strictlyspeaking, is lacking from the text and in this senseuncanny (p. 51 n. 23), is nevertheless a sign of self-hood and thus a necessary key to theories of nar-

rative. Benson concludes that [m]usical polyphonythus defined can only ever be a virtual property ofnarrative literature, but it is precisely the discursivegap bridged by the metaphor that is of interest, theaspiration to polyphony conceived as a paradigm ofmusicality itself (pp. 8687).

In Chapter 4 Benson tackles Blanchots complexanalogizing of narrative voice as a form of absentsong. In Blanchots attempt to work through the ideaof a voiceless, musicless text, the musical trace returns(was always there) as a shadow, a keenly felt absence.In order to unpack this paradoxical dynamic, Bensonexplores Blanchots reading of the myth of Odysseusand the sirens (The Song of the Sirens), in particu-lar the twist that Odysseus does not resist heroicallybut is a coward, risking nothing in his passage by thesirens. Problematizing the conventional reading ofthe myth whereby the sirens simply delay, distract,disrupt, and divert Odysseus from his journey (pp.92, 93, 139 n. 47) and tempt him to spend time withthem instead, the key concept here (if not in LiteraryMusic as a whole) is this: The Sirens song, like thesong of Claudia, is insufficient and imperfect. Itspower as event lies in its being preludial, the beforeof music; an overture of the infinite movement whichis the encounter itself, always at a distance (p. 103).This position allows Benson to take a stand against acertain brand of musicology: The problem with thenotion of subject formation in music as suggested by[Lawrence] Kramer, at least when considered as ameans of reading literary music, is that it relies uponthe anthropomorphic presence of the narrative voicein the act of listening: the written voice in narrative assignifying a speaking voice in the world, which voiceis perceived in turn as the sound of a subject presentto itself (pp. 9697).

Chapter 5 considers novels in which music isvalued for its abstracting separatenessfrom theworld, from the everyday and above all, from lan-guage (p. 10). (One might ask why abstracting andseparateness are always juxtaposed, given that theone does not necessarily imply the other.) Wittgen-steinian ideas about what language is capable of (pp.44, 138139) are juxtaposed alongside case studies ofthe performance of musical canon in Vikram SethsAn Equal Music, the role of the notated score inJeanette Wintersons Art & Lies, and the concep-tion of compositional practice in Ian McEwans Am-sterdam, J. M. Coetzees Disgrace, and Bernard MacLavertys Grace Notes. Benson shows that their verycondition as novels compromises their attempts toplace music out of reach, for in the novel the worldli-ness of music is laid bare. The necessary failureandhence successof these novels, Disgrace and Amster-dam in particular, harks forward to the matter of thenext chapter. Indeed, echoing the Bakhtin discussionin the previous chapter, Benson theorizes that [t]he

102 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

novel need not defer to music as that which it canonly verbally name, and so gesture towards; rather,the novel might be granted a particular privilege asthat form in which the sociability of music can berepresented, accorded a thick description of a piecewith the interwoven strands of the musical act (pp.139140).

Chapter 6 concerns fiction in which the repre-sentational act of literary music is itself problema-tized, even withheld (p. 10). (Here we will pass overthe difference between withheld and without, theword used in the title of the chapter.) The case study isKazuo Ishiguros The Unconsoled, in which, althoughmusicand, unusually, contemporary music at thatplays a massive thematic role (its central protago-nist is a professional pianist), the narrative revolvesaround the endless deferral of a projected musicalevent. Music, Benson argues, resists the enticementsof its narrative description and expectation. To enrichhis analysis Benson invokes Kafkas poetics, in whichmusic was doubly problematic, on the one hand be-cause of its ravishing sensuousness and on the otherhand because of its resistance to language. Bensonspoint, following on neatly from his earlier analysisof Blanchot, is that the more successful we feel theevocation of music to be, the more oxymoronic is thenovel, in that the proximity to music only serves todraw attention to what is missing (p. 142).

In this respect, The Unconsoled is quite differ-ent from the novels discussed in the previous chap-ter. In Art & Lies and An Equal Music there is amoment of exchange in which music and literaturemeet as equals in full view of each other. The nar-rative proves its worth in this moment of exchange,with the predicted enigma resolved in plenitudeparadigmatic plenitude, in that the reader is liftedout of words and towards the apparent semantic im-mediacy of music (pp. 148149). However, as Ben-son notes, Kafka and Ishiguro stubbornly, but withgreat artifice, refuse to let music arrive in any ma-jor sense, and the silence of the novelboth literaland musicalbecomes part of the point (p. 155).It is only fair to point out that, unlike Ryder, the(anti-?) hero of The Unconsoled, Brodsky, one of thesecondary characters, does in fact eventually get toconduct his orchestra, albeit in somewhat unconven-tional circumstances; although Benson does not readthe novel this way, it could be said that this secondarynarrative strand, which has after all coursed all theway through the novel toward the climactic publicshowdown, does provide the reader with some kindof musical arrival, and perhaps even catharsis, giventhe degree to which Brodskys plight inspires sympa-thy from the reader and given the detailed descriptionof the performance provided by Ishiguro. Even if thisis the case, though, Benson is right to argue that justas the other displacements serve to defamiliarize and

thereby heighten basic human predicaments, so theburden placed on music is resolutely conventional.Music is valued for its singular powers of affect, andby these means, its powers of consolation (p. 146,see also pp. 69, 149, 156, 159). In this, Ishiguro is lessradical than Blanchot.

Literary Music is an interesting book and repaysrepeated reading. It should probably be read along-side other similar studies rather than on its own. Al-though it starts from a now familiar Kramerian posi-tion with respect to its musicological contexts, whichmight be said to limit its scope a little and age it pre-maturely, it is more usefully disciplined by its ground-ing in literary theory and fiction studies. Some of Ben-sons arguments have a use beyond the case studiesfrom which they emerge, particularly in the case of theBakhtin and Blanchot chapters, and many of his ob-servations provide useful insights into the workings,intentional or otherwise, of contemporary novelistsand the cultural discourses that they work throughand (usually) uphold.

ANTHONY GRITTENRoyal Northern College of MusicManchester, UK

hein, hilde. Public Art: Thinking Museums Differ-ently. Lanham, MD: Mira Press, 2006, xxix + 167pp., 18 b&w illus., $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

In Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently, HildeHein ambitiously attempts to give a conceptual, his-torical, and normative account of recent steps madeby museums toward ephemerality and interactivity.Museums are relinquishing their claims to the im-mutable and universal. Instead of transmitting eter-nal values to the public, they seek to resonate withtransient ideas and to stimulate sympathetic vibra-tion (p. xxiii). Rather than being storehouses ofprecious objects, guardians of objects deemed fixedin significance (p. 3), museums in the late twenti-eth century began to emphasize dematerialization,process over stasis, variability, impermanence, socialreintegration, and political commitment. Hein arguesthat all of these characteristics, and more, are to befound in new public art that can come to serve asa paradigm for the museum. Its normative programseems to be aimed primarily at museologists and mu-seum administrators, while the conceptual and histor-ical underpinnings will be of interest to art historiansand philosophers already well versed in recent de-bates over the nature of museums.

The book, then, sets for itself a rather dauntingtask. First, it needs to tell and substantiate two histo-ries: that of recent public art as well as that of recentmuseums. Second, since the history of museums will

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be told in terms of the history of public art, Hein needsto pick out salient characteristics, not to say definingcharacteristics, of public art that will be applied tomuseums. Chapter 1, The Experiential Museum,analyzes the changing attitude toward the role ofmuseum-goers experience. Chapter 2, The Private,the Non-private, and the Public, briefly traces thehistory of the terms public and private and then dis-tinguishes private from non-private art in orderto clear the way for a direct consideration of publicart. The following two chapters, Public Art: Historyand Meaning and Innovation in Public Art, col-lect characteristics of public art through a selectivelydetailed account of its history since the 1930s. Heindraws on these characteristics as she sets out her ac-count of recent developments in museum practice inChapter 5, Old Museums and a New Paradigm, andChapter 6, Why a New Paradigm.

Hein begins by analyzing the first step toward themuseums dematerialization: an emerging interest inproducing a certain experience in the members of theaudience. This picks up a thread of argument from herprevious book, The Museum in Transition: A Philo-sophical Perspective (Smithsonian, 2000). The tra-ditional role of the museum was to collect objectsas illustrations of established ideas or devices todemonstrate truths (p. 5). On this model the mu-seum played an authoritative role in the determina-tion of the meaning of the objects collected, as wellas the traditions and histories embodied in the ob-jects. The truths embodied in the objects and pre-sented by museum experts were to be passively, evenreverently, received by the viewing audience. Theexperiential museum treats its audience more sen-sitively. Now they were viewed as variegated, tex-tured beings marked by their own history and experi-ence and by the constructive proclivities they broughtwith them into the museum (p. 7). The experientialmuseum, rather than simply imposing its view ontothe audience, aims to connect with the wants,history, and interests of the individual viewer in or-der to catalyze inquiry, communication, and even dis-putation and dissent (p. 9).

Hein presents the Exploratorium, San FranciscosMuseum of Science and Art, and the HolocaustMemorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as two ex-amples of successful experimental museums. Eachmuseum demands collaboration from its visitors,and each museum makes experience an essential,though not the sole or final, aim of the museum.Each of them is dedicated to the pedagogic prin-ciple that true learning, both cognitive and affective,begins with the learners own effortful experience(p. 15). Hein is careful to acknowledge that muse-ums production of experience is not newall mu-seums produce some experience in their audiences.Rather, the role of experience has changed in the ex-

periential museum. More importantly for her overar-ching project of illuminating the nature of public art,Hein reminds us that the museums attention to pro-duction of experience is not sufficient either to grantthe audience authority in the production of mean-ing or to produce a rich exploration of the contextand cause of experience. As a result, [m]useumswould do well to apply their history of persuasiveauthority to cross-examining experience, rather thanmerely fashioning it and celebrating it (p. 11). Thiscall for the cross-examination of experience is a callto bring aesthetic experiences into a critical publicsphere.

Hein argues that this is precisely the role that pub-lic art has come to play in recent history. After a briefand somewhat freewheeling account of the confusedhistory of the terms public and private, Hein dis-tinguishes between private art (or museum art) andnon-private art not by defining either term, but bypicking out some general characteristics of each andby considering some varieties of non-private, but notyet public, art. So, private art is associated with indi-vidual artistry, is concerned with a pure aestheticproduct, and does not in general countenance atten-tion to its social function or worldly sources (pp. 3536). These characteristics do not apply to non-privatevarieties of art such as folk art, popular art, mass art,or outsider art.

Even though each of these varieties of art is non-private, none qualifies as public because the cre-ation of a public is [public arts] point of departure.Public art presupposes the public sphere and pro-duces a public in relation to that concept (p. 49).This circular-sounding statement allows Hein to claimboth that public art constructs a public and that thepublic constructs public art. That the public con-structs public art is an extension of the argumentfrom the first chapter on experience concerning thetransfer of authority from curators to audience mem-bers. Though attention to experience does not entaila relinquishing of authority, making an artwork pub-lic does. A public, unlike a mass, for example, is notmerely affected by the presentation of a work. In-stead, it ultimately legislates the public identity ofart. Publicsnot one, but manywhile not directlyresponsible for the production of art, have a sense ofentitlement toward what is done in their name. Nolonger content to be merely spoken to or for, theyare emboldened by art and wish to be heard (p. 62,emphasis added).

Rather than presenting an argument for the radi-cal contextualism presupposed here, Hein providesexamples from twentieth-century history of pub-lic art, each of which illustrates a different aspectof contextual influence. She is aware of, and un-concerned with, the question-begging nature of thismethod. She is unconcerned because her aim is not

104 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

lexical certainty but a workable demarcation betweenpublic art and private art in the absence of a cleardefinition (p. xxiv). While there is a great deal torecommend the sort of attention to historical andpractical detail that this method should involve, Ilonged for at least a passing acknowledgment ofthe possibility of different explanations of the samehistorical phenomena. For example, Hein relatesMartha Kendall Winnackers account of the radicalchange that the My Lai memorial statue and museumunderwent between 1977 and 1992 largely as a resultof its changing audience. Few people [in 1992 andnow] remember what happened there; for them thestatue and museum are only a memorial (p. 58). Itseems as though we could equally account for thechanges in the site, the differences in the audience,the changes in the perceptions of the work, and soforth without arguing that the identity of the workhad thereby changed. The normative thrust of Heinsaccount could even be maintained by favoring onekind of public experience and participation over an-other without entering into questions of ontology.

Hein argues that public art began to take itsaudience-emboldening role seriously with the muralsof Diego Rivera. This art-to-public relationship wasencouraged by the paternalistic, though democrat-ically inspired, New Deal. The 1960s saw a resurgenceof attention to public art, but without the paternalismof the New Dealthis new public art was of the pub-lic, and not just for it. This trend has continued andtodays public artists incline to replace answers withquestions. They seek to advance debate and discus-sion. Their art is left open-ended and invites partici-pation. Its orientation is toward process and changerather than material stability. Since its borders areindefinite, so is its authorship (p. 77). While it isfrustrating that none of these stark, categorical as-sertions are accompanied by explicit argument, it isclear that, for Hein, the essential participation, if notauthorship, of the public is what identifies public artas such.

While this public-art interaction can take many po-litical and social shapespolitical advocacy of fas-cism or any form of demagoguery is as possible asliberal or left radicalism (p. 56)Hein draws a linewhen the work reflects a banal pallid sameness orsimply serves to reinforce the status quo. Withoutsome political bite (p. 86), I would say without trulycritical reflection, would-be public art collapses intoa form of non-public, non-private art like mass art.This is a demand placed both on the public and theartist or, as we will see below, the museum. Again,to build this into the identity conditions of public artseems to go too far, but Heins insistence that not justany audienceartwork interaction counts as a publicinteraction, no matter how widespread, is well taken.

The essential role of public participation, in its end-lessly varied and indeterminate shapes, is what finallyties public art to the new paradigm of museums. Theparadigm of the new museum allows it to focus onpeople rather than things (p. xxv). While Hein high-lights the flux and plasticity of meaning and iden-tity that she takes her emphasis on the newly con-stitutive role of the public to entail, her aim is notsimply to relativize meaning and identity to context.Rather, her aim is to normalize the variability, im-permanence, and limited scope that have become ac-ceptable in public art and to urge their adaptationto the museum (p. 145). The shift to normative lan-guage here need not be troubling if we take the mu-seums historical movement, described by Hein, to beincomplete.

While Heins overall aim is relatively clear, and herrich use of examples from the Bamiyan Buddha toKorie Seagulls It Takes a Village (presented in rathershabby black-and-white photographs) can be illumi-nating, the specifics of her argument are less so. Sheclaims that a museum is a work of public art, aperformance in which both objects and people par-ticipate, a work of art, a complexly crafted artifactwith the power to transform its constituent materi-als (p. 110), as though each of these descriptionswere either equivalent or at least compatible and mu-tually illuminating. Are artifacts, performances, andworks simply to be collapsed into the one kind ofentity? Making matters even more obscure, Hein ar-gues that the museum is also a Popperian locus ofthought, quite apart from the actual thinking of in-dividuals (p. 136), a site of controversy as well asa participant in controversies that should be able tohave defensible grounds for the positions it takes(p. 113). These calls for a stable ground of judgment,relatively independent from individual subjects, arean attempt to counterbalance the currently modishcelebration of subjectivity (p. 137). Why Hein chosePoppers third world containing the autonomousand objective contents of thought is puzzling. Afterthe books relentless emphasis on contextualization,fluidity, and plasticity of meaning and its frequentreferences to John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas, itseems that any number of pragmatic or contextualistaccounts of objectivity would have served the argu-ment better.

Public Art is an ambitious effort to weave togetherconcerns from museology, aesthetics, art history, and,to a lesser extent, political philosophy and epistemol-ogy. Heins dazzling ability to think across disciplinesby thinking through a wide array of concrete exam-ples makes this a rewarding book to read. If onlyHein had been better able to avoid the philosophicalfragmentation that is the ever-present danger of thismethod of inquiry.

Book Reviews 105

JONATHAN NEUFELDDepartment of PhilosophyVanderbilt University

de botton, alain. The Architecture of Happiness.