Whitney Davis

When Pictures Are Present: Arthur Danto and the Historicity of the Eye
The eye is not historical, writes Arthur
Danto, but we are.
1
Since we cannot
readily imagine the eye, human visual per-
ception, without its historically being in and
of us, it must be as difficult to evaluate this
claim as its converse, the culturalrelativist
historicismit urges that the eye is histori-
calthat Danto rejects.
2
For a natural histo-
rian of human Lebensformen, it might be
that our historicitythe intraspecific varia-
tion of our knowledge and our systems for
representing itmight partly be due to the
history of the eye. But for Danto, it is a con-
dition of our history that the eye is not his-
torical in any sense. For him, during the his-
torical period in which the eye was not a
function of socioculturally varying practices
and styles of representation, it was also not
evolving. As he puts it in a discussion of
Heinrich Woelfflins philosophy of art his-
tory, vision has a history only in the sense
that visual representations belong to forms
of life that are themselves related to one an-
other historically.
3
By contrast, modes of
our visual cognition, Wartofsky writes,
change with changes in the modes of our
pictorial representation. Human vision has
a history which goes beyond the biological
evolution of the hominid visual system and is
part of that activity of self-creation and
self-transformation which we call cultural
evolution.
4
In his bottom-line proposal,
Wartofsky argues that canonical styles of
representing the seen world change . . . and
introduce transformations of vision.
5
In the
end, then, he would advance an art-histori-
cal theory of style-change for, or as, the his-
tory of vision.
6
Both Wartofsky and Danto would solve
the problem of interconnecting the histories
of the eye and of representational practices
essentially by fiat. For Wartofsky, in the end
the eye simply is socioculturally varying
representational systems and practices. And
for Danto, in the end we simply are that
phase or product of hominid evolution in
which the mechanisms of the eyeincluding
its natural variation if anyare imperme-
able to those systems and practices as they
vary historically. In both cases, these correla-
tions have to be secured in part by tenden-
tious natural histories: while Wartofsky must
urge that the eye is historically different
wherever a representational system or prac-
tice changes historically, Danto must urge
that the evolution of the eyethe history of
its natural selectionhas stopped.
Whether pigeons, sheep, or other nonhu-
man creatures can do more than exhibit
recognitional dispositions upon presentation
of pictures, as Danto has concluded they
can,
7
is beside the issue here. If they can see
(what is depicted in) pictures, this compe-
tence must have an ongoing evolutionary
historywhich Danto denies for human be-
ings. Or it must be directed by some culture
or cultivation that they havebut which
Danto denies for them. In their forms of life,
such culturerevealing their compe-
tenceis not a natural-historical reality; it
must be introduced to them artificially. It is a
human form of life naturally to have lan-
guages and systems of representation. In
turn, then, the putative invariance of human
perception might be the precipitate of the
spreading of depictive culture (and perhaps
even its modes or styles) throughout our
forms of life. But as this is just the issue be-
tween Danto and Wartofsky, we are back
where we started with little help from the pi-
geons or the sheep. I want to suggest that no
matter what mode or style of pictures might
be produced historically, depicting as such
introduces new causal contexts foran
emergent new ecology ofvision as a long-
term biocultural event spread out over many
millennia, penetrating or pervading any indi-
vidual form of life in variable degrees and
with variable importance depending on the
historical presence of pictures therein. But to
admit the evolution of the eye in our natu-
ral history and as a possible factor in the dif-
ferences between our Lebensformen, as I
want to do contra Danto, is not necessarily to
endorse an extreme cultural-relativist thesis.
For Danto, any interaction between see-
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Davis, When Pictures Are Present 29
ing and showing must be a one-way
causal relation, perception-to-cognition and
not cognition-to-perception. To use his ex-
ample, a Chinese pilot sees moving blots and
blurs of color as edges, holes, and surfaces,
and lands successfully on a Western airfield.
Presumably, this does indeed occur. But in
the argument between Wartofsky and
Danto, our question about it is quite narrow.
We need not evaluate the general perceptual
abilities of a pilot, Chinese or otherwise, but
we must determine the role of historically
differing depictive skills, habits, and expecta-
tions in his piloting. The Chinese pilot in
the thought-experiment is not a Chinese
pilot in the sense required if he would not
invariantly depict the Western airfield using
the traditional conventions of Chinese art:
this Chinese pilot is a pilot (he can land
successfully on airfields) and he is Chinese
(he would depict the airfield, like anything
else, in conventional Chinese fashion). As
this kind of Chinese pilot, obviously he can
land on the airfield. To know whether that
piloting is despite the depicting, or con-
versely whether the piloting is because of the
depicting, we therefore need to know
whether he could land on the airfield if he
were not Chinese in the sense mentioned,
that is, when he would not depict it in con-
ventional Chinese fashionfor only this
would prove that his Chinese practice of de-
piction has no causal influence on his pilot-
ing.
But it would seem to be impossible to
make exactly this test. If the pilot is not Chi-
nese in the sense required, then whatever he
doesland successfully or notis no direct
evidence for what people who do depict air-
fields in conventional Chinese fashion would
do. We would not be testing him, the Chinese
pilot in the sense required, and the relation
between his piloting abilities and his habits
of depicting, but rather someone elsesome-
one who is not Chinese in the sense re-
quired by the argument. He might be some-
one with a different habit of depiction. But
exactly the same problem arises with that
person. To show that his depictive set of
mind has no causal role to play in his pilot-
ing, we have to see whether he can pilot
without it. Presumably we cannot easily find
such a person outside of any existing human
form of lifefor in all of them people have
representational habits, skills, and expecta-
tions. And without making the test, both
Wartofsky and Danto can accommodate the
observed fact of the Chinese pilots success-
ful landings. For Wartofsky, they would at
least partly be because of his representa-
tional systemsimplying a world in which
there are as many distinct, well-adapted
forms of life, extending to bioperceptual pro-
cesses, as there are differing representational
traditions. For Danto, they would be despite
themimplying a world in which there is
one well-adapted form of life at the
bioperceptual level regardless of differing
representational traditions.
Of a well-known Christian icon, Danto
elsewhere notes that to see the bird and to
know that it means (signifies) the Holy Spirit
may not be phenomenologically distinct
from seeing the bird tout court.
8
It might
well be that we can analytically disentangle
perception (seeing the bird tout court)
from description or representation (see-
ing the bird of the Holy Spirit). But the vari-
ous proposed tests or thought-experiments
proposed for this analysis, as powerful as
they are, do not look behind the pheno-
menological coherence Danto himself ac-
knowledges here. For me, this is strong prima
facie evidence that such coherence is percep-
tuallycognitively or neurophysiologically
founded. But for Danto, it is no such evi-
dence. Why?
Elsewhere Danto argues that the phe-
nomenology of perception cannot be ap-
pealed to to effect the differences between
artworks and mere things, which are philo-
sophical.
9
As is well known, Danto resists
admitting form, beauty, or sensuousness
unique to artworks into his definition of art,
which instead concerns the material pres-
ence of meanings.
10
And he insists that the
material presentation of meaning in visual
artworks itself cannot be defined in terms
of anything that meets the eye when one
looks at them.
11
Dantos philosophy of art
requires perception that remains partly im-
pervious to the perceivers knowledge about
30 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
the meaning or referential histories and
functions of an artworkfor if such knowl-
edge routinely changes the viewers percep-
tion of the artwork, qua artwork, relative to
his perception of a mere thing from which
the artwork is putatively indiscernible, then
neither the logical method nor the supposed
historical fact of artworks indiscernible from
mere real things tells us much about the na-
ture of art. More exactly, Dantos philosophy
of the philosophical essence of art would
lose a crucial evidentiary pillar, namely, that
artworks, qua artworks, need not be percep-
tually discriminable from mere real things.
And Dantos philosophy of the history of art
would lose a distinctive hermeneutic claim,
namely, that since the early 1960s artworks
need no longer conform to criteria of devel-
opment and progressthe indiscernibility of
artworks from mere things shows such crite-
ria to be inessential to artand thus enter a
post-historical condition admitting not
only the logical but also the phenomen-
ological possibility of artworks indiscernible
from mere things.
In defending the relation between his
method of indiscernibles and his wider phi-
losophy of art, Danto has been pushed to
elaborate a fundamentally independent con-
ception of the impermeability of visual per-
ception (of artworks) to any higher-order
perceptualcognitive description or under-
standing (of artworks).
12
In this defense, the
method of indiscernibles reappears in the
various demonstrations that there might be
cognitively impermeable perceptionat
least in the case of the perception of pictures.
The requisite bridging inference would seem
to be that if there can be perception of pic-
tures impermeable to cognitionthat is, if
there can be perceptual indiscernibility be-
tween pictures and the real things they de-
pict (here stated as the invariance of picto-
rial perception)then surely there can be
artworks indiscernible from real things. The
indiscernibility of artwork and thing and of
picture and thing both derive from the im-
perviousness of perception to cognition,
though it is not always clear if it is the same
impermeabilitysay, invariance in shape-
recognitionin both domains. The ways in
which Danto conducts the cross-mappings
are ingenious. But as far as I can see, the dif-
ficulty for him lies in the way in which the
possible representationality of artworks pu-
tatively indiscernible from mere real things
disturbs his philosophy of art in a fashion
symmetrical to the way in which the possible
denotativeness of resemblant shapes (that is,
their representationality) putatively indis-
cernible from mere real things disturbs his
philosophy of cognitively unmediated per-
ceptioneven though the philosophy of
cognitively unmediated perception at least
partly warrants the philosophy of art. In both
domains, it is actually Danto himself who
best identifies the ways in which this disrup-
tive, emergent pictoriality is hiddenthe
ways in which pictures, as I will put it, are
present calligrammatically. For me the possi-
bility of calligrammatic representationality is
precisely what the putative indiscernibility
of actual artworks or pictures and the mere
real things they resemble ought most
strongly to suggest to us.
Yet despite all this, Dantos argument
about artworks, appealing to a domain of
cognitively unmediated perception suppos-
edly operative in pictorial perception as well,
is in one sense inconsistent with his argu-
ment about pictures. At least, it seems to re-
quire him to invent a kind of perception spe-
cific to artworks that he wants to deny when
it comes to the perception of pictures under-
stood not to be artworks. Thus he writes that
the experience of art descriptionour
coming to understand, say, the complex con-
notations of an allegorical imagereally
does penetrate perception,
13
whereas such
mastery of the symbolic meaning of a pic-
ture (for example, a nonartistic depiction of
the dove of the Holy Spirit) does not pene-
trate our perception of it (our seeing it is a
dove that is depicted and not a pigeon or a
rabbit). This is supposedly because in art
perception itself is given the structure of
thought
14
and hence the history of
art-thought might become identical with the
history of thought-thought. Dantos account
of thisnot my topic hereis intriguing and
has much to say to art historians. I want to
suggest, however, that despite Dantos aes-
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Davis, When Pictures Are Present 31
theticismartistic perception is of another
order altogether
15
compared with the per-
ception of pictureshis account should be
extended to pictures tout court. Whereas he
supposes that thought suffuses and becomes
perception when art is present, I suppose
that thought suffuses and becomes percep-
tion when pictures are present.
According to Danto, although it is elastic,
the ability to recognize pictures (say, picking
out a hawk-picture once we can recognize
hawks in the sky) has neural constancy
across time and space; shape recognition
seeing that the real hawk and the depicted
hawk have the same conformationis in no
interesting sense historical. Presumably be-
cause they must depict horses, horse-pic-
tures perforce look enough alike . . . to en-
able us to pick out the horses every time. It
seems to me, however, that although I recog-
nize horses perfectly well, I might have some
momentary or even great difficulty picking
out a Magdalenian or a Chinese horse-depic-
tion, whether or not my ability to recognize
shape varies with my depictive skills, habits,
and expectations. If the Magdalenian or the
Chinese horse-depiction depicts the shape of
the horse as I recognize that shape, I can in-
deed pick it out in the picture and recognize
the horse-depiction. But the shape in the pic-
ture is not always readily recognizable to me
to be the horse-shape I recognize. The Mag-
dalenian or the Chinese horse-depiction re-
sembles horses whose shapes do not resem-
ble the horses I recognize. Shape recognition
as such may well be in no interesting sense
historical,but depicted-shape-recognition is,
I think, historicaland precisely because
resemblant-shape-recognition, though nec-
essary, is not sufficient for it.
Needless to say, I might happen to recog-
nize shapes in a configuration that does actu-
ally depict just what I recognize those shapes
to beexplaining my accuracy with many, or
perhaps most, Magdalenian and Chinese
configurations. My correct recognition might
just be a lucky accident, a coincidental con-
vergence between my history of shape-rec-
ognitions and the shape-recognitions repli-
cated by the picture maker. But probably
there are other importantand thoroughly
historicalfactors at work as well. Because
the eye varies with representational prac-
tices, for example, is not to say that
representational practices vary exclusively
by Magdalenian or Chinese ethnic or
cultural coordinates, as extreme cultural-rel-
ativist historicism asserts. Perhaps the histor-
ical practices share a great deal perceptually
and cognitively across such presumed
boundaries, enabling many otherwise inex-
plicable feats of cross-cultural understand-
ing. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, Identity
of standards rooted in large similarities of
practice provides on occasion common
ground for those otherwise at home in very
different cultures and societies.
16
Chiang
Yee, for example, observed similarities be-
tween paintings by classically trained Chi-
nese artists and the watercolors or black-
and-white wash drawings of British artists
like Alexander Cozens and John Constable
similarities that made himbelieve there is
really no boundary between English and
Chinese art at all.
17
It is a naturalhistorical
possibility that Chiang Yee was perfectly cor-
rect here in relevant if probably quite re-
stricted respects.
18
The fact that Danto wants
to go all the way in the other directionfrom
impermeable cultural boundary to trans his-
torical perceptual invarianceis neither
here nor therefor thenatural historian.
Although I can succeed in recognizing the
shapes depicted in an unfamiliar configura-
tion, equally I might believe myself to have
recognized a shape that depicts something
that in fact remains unrecognized by me.
This is not, or not only, because the shape I
recognize might really symbolize something
else. My failure might also, or might alterna-
tively, be due to the fact that the shape I rec-
ognize is not the shape that resembles what
the configuration actually depictswhat its
motif might really be. Even here, the prob-
lem is not that I simply fail to recognize the
(correct) shape and (mistakenly) recognize
another. I might be able to recognize both
the correct and the incorrect shape and
nonetheless fail to see or to understand
which one is the pictorial motif, if either is.
(These possibilities were explored, among
others, by Jackson Pollock, whose practice of
absencing pictures, as I would put it, has
been considered by T. J. Clark under the
32 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
pointed title The Unhappy Conscious-
ness.
19
) In such cases, perceptual process is
spinning its invariant wheel and getting me
absolutely nowhere with the depiction.
In a thought-experiment, Danto proposes
to imagine a pair of indiscernible pictures
from different notational systems that mean
quite different things, between which the eye
of course cannot discriminate. Supposedly,
this provides a case of picture-recognition
remaining constant while symbolic meaning
varies historically. But here the eye does not
discriminate between the meanings of the
pictures presumably because it recognizes
exactly the same shapes in themand that is
all. The thought-experiment treats the per-
ceiver like a pigeon with recognitional dispo-
sitions but not like a human being who un-
derstands depiction: the eye has nothing
further to go on, nothing to determine not
only whether the shape recognized in one
picture has the same secondary or conven-
tional meaning as the shape recognized in
the other picturea possible case of
Panofskyan iconographic disjunction, as
the thought-experiment specifies.
20
The eye
also cannot even determineis stipulatively
not allowed to determinewhether the
shape that is a motif in one picture is the
shape that is the motif in the other picture,
the meaning varying in the two different
notational systems because possibly they
pick out different shape-configura-
tionsboth recognized equally well and in-
discernibly as to visual formto be
depictively relevant or not. We might call
this a case of recognitional disjunction: the
perceptually indiscernible pictures appear to
depict the same thing they both resemble,
but in fact they do not. And, to break out of
the closed circuit of the thought-experiment,
we might even be dealing not with two in-
discernible pictures but with two indiscern-
ible resemblant shapes, perfectly recogniz-
able to us, only one of which is a picture at
all. Imagine a painter (call him Painter J)
painting Red Barn Door, a red square both
resembling and denoting a red barn door,
perceptually indiscernible from a red barn
door painted by a barn painter. We could call
this a case of depictive disjunction. In view of
possible recognitional and depictive
disjunction, and preceding any possible
questions about iconographic disjunction,
we can legitimately ask whether depictive-
shape-recognition occurs despite or because
of the cognitive process that determines that
only one or some limited number of the vari-
ous object-resemblances that might be rec-
ognizable and recognized in the configura-
tion actually denote what they resemble. The
failure of shape-recognition is simulta-
neously the failure of depiction (the denota-
tive status of certain resemblata in the con-
figuration) as such. But the success of
shape-recognition is not simultaneously the
success of depiction. If this occurs at allif a
picture is present at all for the perceiver in
questionit must be denotation-grasping or
motif- and image-seeing. In the human
lifeworld, the eye sees what the world
meansat least when it sees what it is
meant.
According to Danto, to understand the
[symbolic] meanings [of pictures] requires
an archaeology of how [they] were used to
mean when not used simply to denote their
resemblata. But because the picture only
denotes some of its resemblata, we still re-
quire the archaeology, implying the history,
when the pictures were used simply to de-
note their resemblata (or to denote their
resemblata as well as the symbolic meaning
thereof). This archaeology might tell us that
although the picture resembles the artists
model, it was not used to denote her or him
except when it was used to show the working
of the artists studio or to advertise the
models own wares. Such possibilities are
puzzling, paradoxical, or calligrammatic in
their internal and external relations of
iconographic, recognitional, and depictive
interaction and disjunction.
21
Danto dis-
misses them as uninteresting niceties or ped-
antries that should not disturb our confi-
dence that we can pick out the horse-
picture every time. But this move, waving
away part of the very mechanism of depic-
tion as it operates in our form of life, is cru-
cial to his argument that the picking-out is
not historical. And it would seem to fly in the
face of majornot simply marginal or pe-
danticpractices and interests in our own
artistic tradition.
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Davis, When Pictures Are Present 33
In Diego Velazquezs Las Meninas (1656),
for example, the figure-shapes in the mirror
in the background ought to resemble the fig-
ures standing in the space in front of the pic-
ture plane, who are in turn supposedly being
depicted by the (depicted) painter on the
canvas facing away from the picture plane.
But perspectivally the figure-shapes in the
mirror specifically denote what we, the im-
plied viewers, see reflected in the mirror,
whatever it is, while the figure-shapes that
the painter is seemingly painting on the can-
vas, though they should closely resemble that
reflection, do not specifically denote it but
rather what the painter sees right in front of
him. And the painting by Velazquez partially
hides these relations of resemblance and de-
notation from the viewer. We cannot be sure
that the figure-shapes being painted by the
painter, even if they necessarily resemble the
figure-shapes reflected in the mirror, do re-
semble the figures outside the picture plane
though we tend to assume that they ought
to do so. Some of the representational direc-
tions of the picture are recognitionally and
conceivably even depictively disjunctive and,
hence, iconographically or symbolically
undecidable.
I would want to center the various
intransitivities of recognition, resemblance,
and reference at the heart not only of logical
debates about depiction but also in any com-
plete view of depiction in the historical
human lifeworld. Danto himself offers many
observations on them under the umbrella of
his notion of the metaphoricity distinguish-
ing art from nonart.
22
His approach is closely
related to his work on sentential states and
the representationality of thought. Like
Jerry Fodor, he wants to identify the module
of the language of thought. In it, we are es-
sentially historical insofar as the proposi-
tional content of belief-sentences must vary
with the location or situation of the knower
whose belief-sentences they are.
23
And he
wants to distinguish this module from mod-
ules, such as visual perception and digestion,
unaffected by changes in historical location
or situation. For immediate purposes here,
the question must be whether represen-
tationality or metaphoricity is or is not per-
ceptually manifest. And I wish to say that it
is calligrammatically manifest in the various
overlapping (in)transitivitiesfor the per-
ceiverof shape-recognizability, relations of
resemblance, and referential direction, expe-
rienced as the perceptual question whether
the shape I recognize denotes what it resem-
bles or whether a picture is present. When
the perceptual question does not arise or
cannot be addressed, a picture is not present.
But when it does arise, and can be perceptu-
allycognitively addressed, a picture is pres-
ent. And in the latter case, perception is his-
torical for just the reasons that we are
historical: the propositional content of the
(perceptualcognitive) belief-sentences that
address the perceptualcognitive question of
whether and just how a picture is present
must vary with the location or situation of
the knower whose belief-sentences they are.
In general, an archaeology tells us which
resemblata were denotative (or not) and
thus tells us where and what the picture is for
someone in some context of the use of the
configuration.
24
To what extent we see the
world around us in terms of or even as a pic-
ture or even just the partial replication of a
picture remains an open question. My extra-
pictorial shape-recognizing abilities have
conditioned my perception of pictures as
well; they are a factor in the history of my
ability to grasp which resemblata of the con-
figuration are denotative, to make and to see
the picture. But the full circuitryfrom pic-
tures to world to picturesis always up and
running. Wartofsky calls it a spiral:
25
and
so it is, though it is not the spiral of canonical
styles pervading the history of human vision
but the spiral of pictures becoming present
in it. Historicity, in this sense, spreads
through but does not necessarily penetrate
every nook and cranny of our sensoryper-
ceptual life in the way asserted by extreme
cultural relativists or by historicists of the
particular stripe Danto attacks. More com-
plex relations have to be considered in which
just one of the threads of our life is our inter-
action with pictures. It is, however, one of the
threads that mean that our lives are histori-
cal.
According to Danto, although the eye has
no history there has been and is historical
changeor even progressin the hand,
34 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
our historically different and varying skills in
the making of pictures and other representa-
tions. And the evident progress of the hand
in picture making presupposes that the eye
itself was not historicalotherwise we
could not detect this progress. Clearly, there
has been cumulative historical refinement of
human skills in making pictures in which cer-
tain resemblata also denote what they re-
semble. But all these histories of progress in
the hand would be penetrated, though no
doubt not utterly pervaded and exhaustively
constituted, by the historicity of the eye in
the sense specified above for the simple rea-
son that in these histories the hand is en-
gaged in making pictures. The skill would not
be the skill it is if certain denotative
resemblata of the configuration constituted
its meaningrendered and relayed its motif
and image to perceivers of the picturebut
could not be produced, refined, and im-
proved by that skill.
If the historically intended denotative
resemblata remain stable, or, to use E. H.
Gombrichs term, if the function of pic-
tures remains stable, then the historicity of
the eye in the progress of a technique in-
tended to render that kind of picture will
likely remain stable.
26
There will be an his-
torical invariance in perceptionin shape-
recognition and depth-perception and so
forthwithin the tradition of the function,
or perhaps what Danto would call the uses
of the meaning, and specifically relative to
its history of replication from one end of
the history to the other. Progress will occur
over a particular historical duration defined
by the continuity of the function. Whatever
he himself might say, logically there is noth-
ing in Gombrichs theory of art history as
suchof making and matchingthat re-
quires transhistorical perceptual invariance
in picture-making and perception, which
occurs despite, not because of, a culture of
showing. Making and matching can take
place precisely as Gombrich describes them
when there is sufficient perceptual
invariance wholly relative to the replication
of a social function of depiction and accom-
modated topartly pervaded byits histor-
ical presence.
The eye, Danto says, has evolution rather
than a history. For millennia, hominid evo-
lution has occurred in the mosaic of
biocultural history. But supposedly there has
been no major human evolution in the past
100,000 years and certainly none in the
bare 600 years from Giotto to Ingres.
27
Thus Danto couples his view that the eye has
no history in the strong cultural-relativist
sense with the claim that even if the eye does
evolve, that history need not interest us.
What evidence suggests that in the evolution
of the eye there has historically been no vari-
ation to have substantively affected practices
of picture makingat least, Danto concedes,
since modern humans replaced Neanderthal
humans? As far as I can tell, this is a
wide-open field for investigation. But for
Danto, it is the Upper Paleolithic cave paint-
ings that suggest that the eye as the eye has
no further history of speak of. To adapt a
comment of Dantos own, evidently the
paleolithic cave painter had as much of the
art of perception as he or anyone would
ever have.
28
Thus, he concludes, the eye had
been evolutionarily made by the time the
cave paintings were produced (say, 20,000
years ago)and probably much earlier,
perhaps a million and a half years ago, per-
haps earlier. This interpretation might well
be correct. But the evidence seems to be con-
sistent with an historicist as well as an
invariantist assessment of the past hundred
thousand years of history. The replacement
of Neanderthal by modern humans has often
been held to be due to the advantages con-
ferred by culture belonging to the emergent
modern human populations but not to the
Neanderthals who competed with them for
resources in partly shared ecological
niches.
29
Indeed, picture-making activities
might have contributed causally to the emer-
gence of spoken language in modern hu-
mans or, whether or not language already ex-
isted or required or coevolved with picture
making, to the general perceptualcognitive
equipment of the populations who replaced
the Neanderthals.
30
We need not endorse
any particular scenario to note that the pres-
ence of pictures, wherever and however they
appeared, became a relevant causal context
of large-scale biocultural variationjust as
tool making had been for some millions of
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Davis, When Pictures Are Present 35
years. Thus, Danto might put himself in the
odd position of accepting that 50,000 years
ago the culturalrelativist historicist would
be rightthat certain representational prac-
tices and technologies reorganized the eye,
hand, and possibly the cortex itself insofar as
natural selection would favor populations
that preserved the mutations that enabled
the practicesbut that today the very forces
accepted to be so powerful then have utterly
ceased to operate. For Danto, in the evolu-
tion of the eye there has not been a genera-
tional change, as in computers. But the tran-
sition from Neanderthal to modern humans
might be one such change, well within the
duration in which the eye has no history.
And who is to say whether an anthropologist
from Marsas beloved to the historicist as
indiscernibles are to the humanistmight
not take the emergence of writing (around
3,000 B.C.) or the electronic information-pro-
cessing revolution (around 2000 A.D.) to be
others?
31
The proper questions, it seems to me, are
within a field constituted by accepting that
whenever pictures are presentour most
difficult problemthe eye has both an ongo-
ing evolutionary history and a specific
history in the human lifeworld in the admit-
tedly particular (perhaps non-Wartofskyan)
senses I have given. When pictures are pres-
ent, mutations in ocular structure can be se-
lected in relation to the adaptation of a pop-
ulation that uses the pictures. And shape
recognition or depth perception can be
bound to the way in which that use selects
certain motifs and images for reproduction
and locates them in a configuration. For me
the question is how and to what extent these
replicatory histories pervade our forms of
life in relation to other historiesnot
whether visual perception is to some extent
permeable to representation at all. On the
one hand, there are sensoryperceptual
invariances pervading our form of life per-
haps far more substantial than anything a
picture might enable or require us to see that
we would not otherwise. And on the other
hand, there are causes for differences be-
tween pictures pervading our form of life
perhaps far more substantial than an histori-
cal variation in our seeing. A theory of the
domain where seeing and showing come to
be nested within one anotherand a philos-
ophy of artbegins there.
WHITNEY DAVIS
Department of Art History
Northwestern University
1859 Sheridan Road
Evanston, Illinois 60208
INTERNET: w-davis@nwu.edu
1. See Seeing and Showing above. Related essays
include Dantos Description and the Phenomenology
of Perception, in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpre-
tation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and
Keith Moxey (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp.
201215; Animals as Art Historians: Reflections on the
Innocent Eye, in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual
Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 1992), pp. 1531; and Depiction and De-
scription, in The Body/Body Problem: Selected Essays
(University of California Press, 1999), pp. 98121.
2. I am not sure whether Marx Wartofsky himself
held exactly the views of the Wartofsky criticized by
Danto, which will also be the ones considered here. An
extreme culturalrelativist historicism is perhaps al-
lowed by Wartofskys historical epistemology. See es-
pecially Perception, Representation and the Forms of
Action: Towards an Historical Epistemology, in his
Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding
(Boston: D. Reidel, 1979), pp. 188210.
3. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contempo-
rary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University
Press, 1997), p. 200.
4. Marx W. Wartofsky, The Paradox of Painting: Pic-
torial Representation and the Dimensionality of Visual
Space, Social Research 51 (1984): 864865. See also his
Sight, Symbol, and Society: Towards a History of Vi-
sual Perception, Philosophical Exchange 3 (1981):
2338.
5. Wartofsky, The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial
Representation and the Dimensionality of Visual
Space, p. 877.
6. Ibid., p. 864.
7. Danto, Animals as Art Historians, p. 24.
8. Danto, Description and the Phenomenology of
Perception, p. 211 (emphasis added).
9. Ibid., p. 212.
10. Arthur Danto, The End of Art: A Philosophical
Defense, History and Theory 37 (1998): 132133.
11. Arthur Danto, Responses and Replies, Danto
and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993), p. 196.
12. See especially, Richard Wollheim, Dantos Gal-
lery of Indiscernibles, Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark
Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 2838. Wollheim
urges, first, that the putative indiscernibility of some
artworks and some mere things cannot necessarily be
generalized across the class of all artworks as a revela-
36 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
tion of their essence, as Danto would have it, and, sec-
ond, that the putative indiscernibility of some artworks
and some mere things might be overcome
discernibility might be introducedwhen the mere real
things or objects of art become artworks in our pro-
cess of perceiving and understanding them.
13. Danto, Description and the Phenomenology of
Perception, p. 214.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Alasdair MacIntyre, Colors, Cultures, and Prac-
tices, The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. Peter A. French,
Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein;
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1992): 123 (quota-
tion from p. 20). In his example, Japanese and European
viewers mutually came to seeto recognize, to ad-
mire, and to reproducethe colors, effects of light and
shade, and so on developed in one anothers pictorial
arts but invisible to each culture in its existing visual
practices and application of color terms and classifica-
tions. Nonetheless, within the practice of painting in
each case . . . shared standards [were] discovered which
enable[d] transcultural judgments of sameness and dif-
ference to be made (ibid., p. 20). None of this tells
against Dantos invariantism respecting some percep-
tual mechanisms and cognitive processing. As Donald
Davidson puts it pithily, if some discriminative mecha-
nisms were not built in, none could be learned (The
Second Person, The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. French,
Uehling, and Wettstein, p. 262).
17. The Silent Traveller in London (London: Country
Life, 1938), pp. 161162, and see further The Chinese
Eye (London: Methuen & Co., 1935).
18. According to Danto, Chiang Yee internalized a
Western idea of novelty as the concomitant of original-
ity (The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense, p.
138). Thus he might be an example of a Chinese pilot
who is precisely not the kind of Chinese pilot speci-
fied in the thought experiment discussed earliernot
the kind of schemata-bound artist E. H. Gombrich
rather uncharitably took him to be, a Chinese painter
depicting (if not actually seeing) the world of England
wholly according to the conventions of the relatively
rigid vocabulary of the Chinese tradition (Art and Illu-
sion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representa-
tion [Princeton University Press, 1960], pp. 8485).
19. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a
History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), pp.
299369.
20. For disjunction, see especially, Erwin Panofsky,
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stock-
holm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960).
21. In his lively dissection of Rene Magrittes drawing
of 1926, Ceci nest pas un pipe*, Michel Foucault consid-
ers it to be a calligram (This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed.
James Harkness [University of California Press, 1983],
esp. pp. 1931). See more broadly Calligram: Essays in
New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
22. See his Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A
Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.
165208, and Metaphor and Cognition, in Beyond the
Brillo Box, pp. 7387. Nol Carroll, Essence, Expres-
sion, and History: Arthur Dantos Philosophy of Art,
Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), pp. 79106, provides acute and lucid
discussion.
23. Danto, Responses and Replies, p. 195; The
Body/Body Problem, pp. 206226.
24. Elsewhere I have proposed that when we under-
stand depictions we are surveying (or already know
about) the frequency, distribution, and variation of the
configuration, at least in principle in all of its perceptu-
ally discriminable aspects, in ongoing usages; see Whit-
ney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psy-
choanalysis (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996),
chaps. 13. If it is a picture, necessarily denoting some-
thing it resembles, in what I call its replicatory historya
viewers ongoing scrutiny of and return to it and in its
mnemonic and material reproductionthe denotatively
resemblant aspects of the configuration likely will be
held relatively constant while other aspects, resemblant
or not, will change, degrade, or disappear at perceptual,
cognitive, and material levels. There are many connec-
tions between the account I am advocating and Stephen
Mulhalls discussion, in relation to texts by Heidegger
and Wittgenstein, of experiences of aspect-dawning
and regarding-as spreading through our world as we
find it, at least in part, represented or reflected to us pic-
torially and artistically (On Being in the World:
Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects [London:
Routledge, 1990], esp. chaps. 1 and 6). Roughly, the phe-
nomenology of aspect dawningand our subjective
constitution thereinwould be grounded in the actual
natural and intersubjective social history or archaeology
of the presencing(andabsencing) of pictures.
25. Wartofsky, Paradox of Painting, p. 877.
26. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich attends most fa-
mously to the function of depicting the world of natu-
ral appearances, which he associates with classical
Greek culture, but other historical functions could be,
for example, the ancient Egyptian denotation of the in-
terior section (not the surface) of objects in represent-
ing an extra- or supervisual ontology (see further, Whit-
ney Davis, The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian
Art [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989]).
27. Actually, Danto waffles just a bit on the point.
Elsewhere he writes that perception itself undergoes
relatively little change over the period in questionlets
say from about 1300 to 1900 (After the End of Art, p. 49
[emphasis added]). But as any change could have
specifiable consequences for the practices and the his-
tory of representation (the point has to be investigated
and evaluated empirically), this concession might be all
that my natural historian would require to be fully rec-
onciled with Danto.
28. Danto, After the End of Art, p. 50. I set aside the
question raised above: Do the manyand often over-
lapping, partial, and hard-to-make-outresemblances
of marks to things in paleolithic mark-assemblages
amount to denotations of just those things and to the
pictoriality of the mark-assemblages as a whole or to
their identity as paintings? The phenomena of Upper
Paleolithic marking taken as a whole call for precisely
the archaeology advocated above. See further, Davis,
Replications, chap. 3.
Symposium: The Historicity of the Eye Davis, When Pictures Are Present 37
29. Fine overall accounts are provided by Clive Gam-
ble in The Peopling of Europe, 700,00040,000 Years
before the Present, and Paul Mellars in The Upper
Palaeolithic Revolution, Prehistoric Europe: An Illus-
trated History, ed. Barry Cunliffe (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), pp. 541 and pp. 4278.
30. See especially, Iain Davidson and William Noble,
Human Evolution, Language and Mind: A Psychologi-
cal and Archaeological Inquiry (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996). Davidson and Noble propose
that certain hominid behaviorsthe most important
types they want to identify are pointing and trac-
ingled to the emergence of language. These behav-
iors must essentially have been picture-making activi-
ties if they operated as Davidson and Noble claim that
they did (see Davis, Replications, pp. 160161). For me
this leaves the origin of picture makingwhat I am here
calling the presence of picturesundetermined in their
scenario. But if they are right, once pictures were pres-
ent, spoken language (which they date to approximately
100,000 years ago at the earliest) was a biocultural
by-product of picturing.
31. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind:
Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition
(Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 269360, develops
elaborate suggestions about hardware changes (for
example, about where memory is located) and new
visiosymbolic cognitive pathways laid down respec-
tively with the origin of depiction in the Upper
Paleolithic period, the development of writing systems
in the Bronze Age, and alphabetization in the first mil-
lennium B.C. As we might expect, archaeological evi-
dence and neurological correlations are not always
readily apparent, but this is not a defect in Donalds the-
oretical models of perceptualcognitive history as such.
38 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism