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Arnaut Karel. A pragmatic impulse in the anthropology of art ? Gell and semiotics. In: Journal des africanistes, 2001, tome 71,
fascicule 2. pp. 191-208;
doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/jafr.2001.1277
https://www.persee.fr/doc/jafr_0399-0346_2001_num_71_2_1277
Karel ARNAUT*
* Ghent University
excess and to end up with nothing. Instead, I try to show that the initial
analytic renewal gets eventually caught up in some theoretical spin and that
by detecting the latter we can profitably save the former.
For the sake of this argument I make a distinction between two parts of
the book. The first part consists of chapters 2 to 6 in which Gell outlines his
new method and terminology and illustrates their use with ethnographic
examples. The second part consists of the introductory chapter 1 in which
Gell sets out the general lines of his theory, which is then further developed
in the chapters 7, 8, and 91.
1 I will not be dealing much with chapter 8 because it more or less stands on its own and is
rather detached from the rest of the book, and from the problematic of the « index » and the
« anthropological theory » with which this review article is concerned.
2 There is a vast literature on Peirce. Apart from a rather general introduction (Hookway
1985), I have used a number of recent publications by the anthropological linguist Benjamin
Lee (1997) and the semiotic anthropologist Richard Parmentier (1997a and 1997b).
3 Although introduced into sign-theory by Peirce, the term « abduction » was redefined and
popularised by Umberto Eco. In his hands abduction became a rather vague term, covering
what one commonly understands as speculation or hypothesising : not strictly controlled
kinds of scientific knowledge (Caesar 1999, pp. 117-119).
around (Gell 1998, p. 27). To the extent that a variable in the above
equation exerts agency relative to another variable that undergoes the effects
of it, the former is the agent and the latter the patient. People (Artist,
Recipient, but sometimes also the Prototype) can bring to bear « primary
agency» on objects, while an object's agency is of a secondary kind,
derived as it is from the motivated actions of primary agents. It is important
to note in this how the agency of people when applied to many objects is
being transferred and disseminated by artefactual indices.
Indices are bi-directional, they point (i) towards their Prototype and
Artist (abduction of origination) and (ii) towards the Recipient (for instance
by « captivating », « trapping », or « repelling » their observers or
addressees). This indexicality can further be seen accompanying the
distribution of objects in time and space : objects refer back to their origin
(place and time of production, prototype, artist), are inscribed with their past
use (e.g. handling, blood sacrifices, etc.), and may influence the production
of other artefactual indices whereby the original index is turned into a
prototype.
Examples of artefacts-in-context throughout the book illustrate the
above exemplary indexical profile of the artefactual signs. The two most
salient features of the objects that emerge from these reconstructions are (i)
objects « internalise » the agency of one and mostly several people/agents,
and (ii) objects « exteriorise » their internalised agency (power, meaning,
intention) in the social action that surrounds it. These two reconstructive
gestures follow the parallel movements of involution and distribution. At
the empirical level one witnesses a near-identification between these very
social objects and the people that socialise (with) them.
Together with the four terms, Gell also devises a notational system
with letters for each of the four agentive variables and for each of the two
statuses (agent, patient) ; connecting them through long or short arrows.
These arrows can stand for any possible action effected from one variable
upon another, while the long arrow usually represents the culminating
moment in the nexus of actions and relationships described. Here it is
important to note that the diagrams by which these contexts are formalised
are not put forward as presentations of « what objectively happens », but are
made to reveal a certain perspective on who exerts agency on whom or what
(Gell 1998, p. 57).
In all, such a method supported by a manageable array of terms and
interrelations appears to promisingly explore the domains of interaction that
decenter (contextualise) the art object and turn it simultaneously into a tool
and an agent of semiotic action and intersubjective exchange. Much of this
success can be seen residing in the choice and partial redefinition of the
Peircean « index ».
Although Gell is careful to point out that he merely borrows the term
from Peirce and does not necessarily take much « content » or définition
with it, looking at how the index is generally positioned among other terms
in Peirce's system is illuminating. The index features in one of Peirce's
three sign-type trichotomies, the one that distinguishes icon, index, and
symbol. Icons are signs that establish relationships between different visual
or other experiential registers, they basically translate certain « qualities »
into other « qualities ». Symbols are signs which relate a signified to a
signifier which is recognised as such by convention ; « a law » causes the
symbol to be interpreted as referring to an object. The index, then, covers
signification whereby there is contiguity between sign and object to the
extent that the object modifies the sign. Comparing these three domains of
signification one can attribute to them a specific terrain of human and
scholarly activity. The field of the icon is exemplarily « cultural » : at a
relatively low level of awareness people experience phenomena and order
and connect these experiences. The scholarly activity that deals with art as
iconic signification is aesthetics (Gell 1998, pp. 4-5). The field of the
symbol is that of communicative action relying on relatively stable codes
for articulating experiences/knowledge/intentions ; the most linguistic-like
of the art studies disciplines is iconography, which seeks to decode the
meanings in art (Gell 1998, pp. 6-7). Indices then constitute a third field
somewhere in between the two others, that of the « social », of human
agents using « cultural » objects to « articulate » their action, intentions, etc.
Gell (1998, p. 6) sees artefactual indices play « the practical mediatory role
in the social process ». The discipline most suited to deal with this domain
is a new anthropology of art й to be built from scratch, according to the
author, because anthropologists so far have been lured into aesthetic and/or
iconographie analysis. Finally, within the domain of the social, Gell
perceives one other discipline that can deal with art but differently : the
sociology of art (e.g. Bourdieu) or the social history of art focus on the
institutional side of art use and the participation of large, society-wide
groupings (classes), in the art phenomenon. In contrast, as Gell (1998, p. 1 1)
concludes in his introduction, anthropology operates ideally in a
biographical space, that of the lives and life-stages of subjects and objects alike.
The above presentation is meant to bring out how I see « index »
functioning at at least two levels within Art and Agency. As an analytic key-
term it helps to develop a new method of analysing « social objects ». As a
term known and used by theories of signification in the human sciences, the
index is made to index, so to speak, a proper anthropological perspective on
4 More specifically Strathern's cocept of the « distributed person » and Munn's theorising of
Kula in Gawa as « process of constructing an intersubjective spacetime » in which she
develops a « generative or causal-sequential and iconic nexus of relations » (Munn 1986,
pp. 268 et 269).
agents, and encapsulate willpower. This leads to the conclusion that art
objects as much as persons are at the same time part of social networks and
embody, internalise these networks. This model of the internal and external
distributed nature of objects and human beings, in chapter 7, prepares for
the final argument in chapter 9 that not only do people and objects act in
social networks, they also think in them. The Malangan memorial carving
(New Ireland) is brilliantly theorised as an index through which the total
« agentive capacity » of the deceased is reproduced in the « heads » of the
living (in return for ritual payments). In another, final example, the Kula
circulation of objects (the example is from the Kula ring of which Gawa is
part) is identified as the workings of an extended mind, the mind of the Kula
operator thinking (strategically) through objects and transactions, their
history and their anticipated future ; in other words Kula is extra-bodily
cognition from a largely invisible but nonetheless ever-present Kula
operator.
The last chapter concludes with two cases which at first sight are
somewhat of an anti-climax. First we see « the extended mind » at work in
the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. This seems to beg the question because the
mental participation of the artist in all and every instance of his / her opus is
presupposed, and Gell ultimately capitalises on an oeuvre and a particular
work (Large Glass and its constituent parts) which the artist sought to frame
as his extended self through inscribing it with indices (traces) of himself.
The second and penultimate example of the Maori meeting house makes the
rather obvious point that it is a space where past (ancestors), present
(memories and aspirations), and future (children, model for future building)
merge ; here Gell puts to use the observation by Nicholas Thomas that these
houses index the vitality of the group (Gell 1998, pp. 251-258)5. However,
in both cases, it is the obvious that Gell wants us to face : the fact that
individuals and groups self-consciously objectify their (changing)
consciousness in the material environment they create for themselves and,
surely, for others. Indices reveal their time-transcending, shifting, potential
because they can, at other moments in time refer to other ancestors, to
another present and another past. What is happening in these last pages is
that Gell puts the index as analytic instrument back into the hands of the
5 For this Thomas is fully acknowledged. This is not the case for a well-known art-historical
analysis of Large Glass by Rosalind Krauss (1977) in which she uses the concept of the
index to analyse contemporary art ; Krauss is recognised (Bal & Bryson 1991, p. 190, n 70)
as the one who introduced the « index » (or « shifters » as Peirce »s student Jacobson called
them) into art studies. This is pure « abduction of origination » from my side, but it seems
that the finale of the book equally tells about the initial inspiration for Art and Agency.
From the very start, Gell makes the choice of considering visual art
and excluding verbal and musical arts. Apart from this, he makes it clear
that his is a theory which supplements regular art theories and art history to
the degree that they appear successful in making sense of non- Western
colonial and post-colonial arts - if they are indeed, Gell prefers to stay away
from them. By implication his is a theory of « anthropological art » or what
he elsewhere called « primitive art » (1992, p. 62, fh 1) making thereby the
rather unappealing move of aligning anthropology with precolonial (and
surely, precolonial-like) non-Western society7. Methodologically Gell
excludes three ways in which anthropologists so far have approached art :
(i) as meaningful (language-like) communication, (ii) as sophisticated form
appreciated according to culture-specific aesthetic standards, and(iii) as
special products circulating in recognised art institutions. Apart from the
references to the prototypical theories of Mauss and, to a lesser degree Lévi-
Strauss, Gell sees anthropology effectively covering the relational context
constituted by human lives and life-stages. This biographical outlook
situates anthropology in between sociology (supra-biographical) and
psychology (infra-biographical).
All this indeed makes for a whole series of exclusions and what
emerges from it is Gell' s resolution to carve out an empirical field that is
substantially different from Western / modern art and that therefore cannot
be successfully covered by existing art studies. Distancing himself from
most contemporary anthropological art studies and aligning his theory with
those of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, demonstrates how determinedly Gell is
7 As can be see from his other work and from his own reflections on it (Gell 1999), it was
not at all Gell's overall purpose to distinguish an empirical zone of primitive artistic action.
Such empirical reduction, I argue, emerged specifically from the theory-building in Art and
Agency to the extent that it prevented Gell from fully integrating the underlying ideas
developed in essays such as « Vogel's Net » and « On Coote's " Marvels of everyday
vision " » in this, his ultimate book on the anthropology of art. In the light of what he later
said about these two essays (in Gell 1999), this is all the more surprising. Of the former
essay, Gell declared that it was meant to open up the reactionary, 19th century definition of
art used in the anthropology of art, and to put Duchamp and so-called primitive art on an
equal footing {idem, p. 18). The purpose of this « Coote » essay is, according to the author,
approaching « a work of art as something more pragmatic and something wich emerges out
of a context of social interaction » {idem, p. 20).
looking for a (new) theory of other art very much like Mauss was looking
for an other economy and Lévi-Strauss, even in his ideas on art, for other
ways of constructing knowledge. To start with Mauss, it has been argued
that L 'essai sur le don rather frankly constructs an anti-image of commodity
exchange to the extent of blurring a large range of factual distinctions in the
kinds of gifts described (Testait 1998, Thomas 1991). In Lévi-Strauss' ideas
on art, Hénaff (1998, pp. 190-213) detects a similar kind of « orientalist »
search for an anti-western art object. Here we see that Lévi-Strauss puts
forward the opposition between representation (in western art) and
signification (in «primitive» art). Signification resembles index-like
« participation » in that there is a material relation between the signifier and
the signified ; the signifier has not liberated itself from what it signifies.
This primacy of material over model is to be found, according to Lévi-
Strauss, in primitive art and in early Western art. Contrarily, in
representative art (Western art since the quattrocento), the model prevails
over the material, and through mimesis « the represented world is a world
possessed in effigy, mastered in its double » (Hénaff 1998, p. 196).
The general point about these, admittedly rather crudely summarised,
theories of art is that they feature in a shared tradition of imagining other
art. In building a distinctive theory (« anthropological ») pertaining to a
distinctive empirical terrain (non-Western, precolonial, primitive, etc.), Gell
does not escape this othering of art and the tradition of ideas that comes
with it.
There is no space here to illustrate the many models which this
imagining of other art has produced over a period of more than one hundred
years. For this we can rely on a recent reconstruction by Richard Parmentier
(1997b, pp. 63-89) who found that in culture historical discourse, one
distinguishes four epochs or types of cultures, each characterised by one
kind of prototypical semiotic activity. Slightly adapting his reconstruction
for our purposes we could distinguish between :
1. Cultures of confusion (primitive or archaic culture) employ symbols
without consciousness of the fundamental bar between signifier and
signified ; the signifier is magically confused with the signified ; the natural,
the human and extra-human (gods) realms participate in each other8'
Prototypical art product : the « fetish ».
2. Cultures of motivation (classical and medieval culture) see the
phenomenal world as a realisation of the divine realm ; signifiers are
8 With reference to Lévi-Strauss, Parmentier (1997b, p. 79) names this « the Age of
Bricolage ».
motivated by their signifiées ; the natural and human world are directed by
supra-worldly forces. Prototypical art product : the idol.
3. Cultures of convention (modernity) use conventional signs, and are
well aware of their arbitrary nature ; modern man assumes a positive
transparency between the phenomenal world and the realm of man-made
signs. Prototypical art product : the « representative » painting.
4. Cultures of aesthetics (postmodernity) detach signifying from any
referential ground ; signifiers are emptied ; there is multiplication of
autonomous code structures severed from an anchoring reality. Prototypical
art product : contemporary art collages, installations, and happenings.
The above model may seem dated and somehow too essentialising to
be still in use in the humanities. However, this is not the case. Up to the
present there is a vivid debate in art history, for instance, about how other
peoples' art functions and what it really is. For an example I turn to a
review by Arthur Danto of David Freedberg's The power of images.
Looking for a fundamental explanation of « the power of images », Danto
(1990) introduces the difference between « transeunt » and « immanent »
representation. In the first case the subject is distinct from the image
representing it, while in the case of « immanent representations made in
tribal Africa » or in religious icons « it is believed that the thing represented
is actually present in the representation » (Danto 1990, p. 342). The above
example further brings out that the reconstructed semiotic typology
differentiates types of art which are often grouped otherwise, for instance in
two opposing categories. Such is the case in Lévi-Strauss' distinction
between signifying and representative art - and this is a classic, popularised
as it was by Gombrich» (1963) opposition between conceptual and
perceptual art.
In seeking to capture Art and Agency in the above semiotic typology,
we could naively remark that most of the objects that feature in the book fall
within the categories of what culture historians would call confused and
motivated art (cultures 1 and 2 in Parmentier's scheme). Moreover, two of
the final examples in Chapter 9 virtually exemplify the fetish and the idol,
respectively. The Malangan memorial carving is the confused object par
excellence because it pulls together in its image the prototype (the
deceased), the artist (the few who have acquired the knowledge of
production) and the recipient (the wider community). The Gawan Kula, on
the other hand, perfectly illustrates the motivated object, controlled as it is
from a distance by a semi-divinised Kula operator.
However, presenting it like that, denies the theory-driven construction
of ethnographic « objects ». Therefore I do not argue that Gell has fallen
victim to the highly questionable semiotic typology presented above and
symbols would bring out the kind of qualities Gell chooses not to deal with.
Icons in Peirce's trichotomy are signs that share certain qualities with their
object. Considering this signifier-signified relationship one can highlight a
degree of resemblance between signifier and signified, either based (i) on
convention (Bal & Bryson 1991, p. 189), or(ii) on personal, albeit
negotiable, experience (Vansina 1984, pp. 136-137)9. Aesthetics in its
broader sense can be taken to refer to signification and valuation of qualities
(colour, visual or auditive configuration, texture, smell, etc.) that different
orders of experience differentiate or share (see Morphy 1994, p. 673).
Symbol on the other hand almost always points to conventional meanings of
images and objects ; analysing these falls within the range of iconography
and iconology. Stereotypically, iconology, unlike « aesthetics », approaches
the art object almost exclusively as an encoded message, and has less
attention for aspects of quality and materiality.
The above presentation brings out how approaching the art object as
icon and symbol covers most of regular art historical practice and indeed
most of what « art anthropology » has submitted as its research programme
(Morphy 1994). It is precisely in reaction to this double programme of
aesthetics and iconology as formulated by Morphy that Gell presents his
« third way » based on the concepts of index and abduction10. Put otherwise,
foregrounding the « index » can be seen within a general strategy of
dislocating icon and symbol, aesthetics and iconology from the centre of
anthropological theories of art.
Moves similar to the one of Gell can be witnessed in art history and
anthropology from the part of semiologists such as Mieke Bal, Norman
Bryson (Bal & Bryson 1991), and Keith Moxey (1994) for art history, and
Richard Parmentier (1997b) for anthropology. Their « démarches »
resemble the one by Gell in that they (i) rely on Peirce for methodological
guidance, (ii) use the « index » to discover neglected aspects of the sign-
functions of art objects, and (iii) envisage to build a general theory of
art /material culture which goes beyond the traditional framework of
separately regimented meaning, form and quality analysis.
On at least one important point Gell does not fit the « sémiologie
consensus » portrayed above : he privileges the index as much as he
excludes the iconic and symbolic functioning of art objects. Such exclusion
is not at all what the other semiologists have in mind. On the contrary, the
reconstruction of the semiotic typology by Parmentier (1997) had the
9 Vansina (ibidem) speaks of a « mental image » in the mind of the artist and of the patron ;
both their preconceptions of what the object should look like direct its realisation.
10 It must be pointed out that Morphy (1994) does not speak of a double programme but sees
the study of form and meaning come together in an enlarged programme of aesthetics.
1 1 Although Gell at some stage admits that « there seems something irreducibly semiotic
about art » (p. 14), he states clearly enough that he suspects semiologists of obstinate
linguistic imperialism.
Venturing a step far beyond these observations and into the realm of
critical semiology, « meaning » and « power » in Gell's hands are
redistributed in their contexts and not locked up in the objects themselves,
whether the latter positioning of meaning or power is believed in by its
users, constructed by its anthropologists, or marketed by its tribal art
merchants. However, the latter kind of « protentions » outside the realm of
« traditional » art practice and the traditional anthropological subject, and
into the uses of objects in the context of commodity economy or in
ethnographic practice (whether professional or amateur) are few and far
between. And now that we have assessed the potential of the index in
spelling out social objectification, this may seem all the more disappointing.
By confronting Gell with the other semiologists, we are bound to
conclude that his can be conceived as a profoundly sémiologie way of
dealing with art. On the other hand, we learn from this confrontation that
excluding other processes of signification (iconic and symbolic) is most
probably narrowing one's view of the overall meaningful functioning of
objects. I have tried to argue that the exclusion of iconic and symbolic
signification may be motivated by Gell's resolution to build a proper
anthropological theory. This prompted him to push aside aesthetics and
iconography and led indirectly to the excommunication of the allegedly
non-indexical forms of signification. From what we can see from the other
semiologists, by having set these limitations, Gell may eventually have
drained his method from very useful resources.
One of the other consequences of opting for « traditional »
anthropological subjects was that, as his theory developed, Gell chose to
focus on what we identified as closed contexts in which the preferred
mechanisms of participation and motivation appeared unproblematic if not
downright exemplary. My final argument is that staying within these closed
contexts, focussing on these confused and motivated signs, and
presupposing total understanding between the different participants (artist,
recipient), has prevented Gell from sorting out the essential aspect of the
index, namely its indexicality. In the final section of this paper, I will
demonstrate that Gell's concern with building an anthropological theory has
regimented his sémiologie ideas in such away that he was unable to
perceiving the structural problem of indexicality of the Gellian index. Once
one starts dealing with this issue, emerges a series of research questions
which can be characterised as « pragmatic ».
When presenting the concept of the index in Art and Agency, I pointed
out that although the term was of Peircean provenance, the core
characteristic of this « natural sign » resembled the definition given by
Thomas Sebeok, namely that there is a causal relation between signifier and
signified. Taking the example of deer stripping bark of trees whereby the
stripped bark is the index (Hookway 1985, p. 123), brings out the main
characteristics of this kind of indexicality : there is a general focus on
spatial contiguity (the deer must have touched the tree), there is an aspect of
ongoing participation (as traces) and motivation (tasteful bark, hungry deer),
and, finally, the stripped bark draws attention to its maker and triggers
speculations about his/her identity, intentions, etc. (abduction of
origination).
This is the meaning in which index is used in most of Art and Agency
and in two other publications mentioned above, namely Thomas'
description of the Maori meeting house and Krauss' analysis of traces of the
absent / present artist in contemporary art. However, this « index » in some
of its aspects is different from the way other semiologists like Parmentier
(1997b) and Bal & Bryson (1991) use it. They stay closer to the linguistic
definition of indices as « shifters » : « empty » signifiers within the object
which point to elements inside but also outside the whole object ; the basic
point about these shifters —think of a person in a painting pointing to
something or someone outside the painting- is that any changes in this
« outside » provokes shifts of meaning. Therefore, because they consider
changes of context to be essential in grasping the full historicity of the art
object, the other semiologists find it also advisable to make use of another
Peircean term, that of interprétant. « Interprétant » basically stands for the
meaning that is created by the recipient assuming a certain ground -the
« recognition » of what the object is or means on the basis of acquired
knowledge or past experience. Again in changing contexts and in
confrontations between recipients and « alien » objects, the reconstruction
of the interprétant is problematic and therefore a critical subject of enquiry.
After all, when the recipient does not share common ground with the artist
or the prototype, shifts in meaning are bound to occur.
I have argued that Gell remains operating ethnographically within
closed contexts which we can now redefine as : (i) contexts in which there is
no fundamental change in the contextual referents to which the shifters are
pointing, and (ii) contexts in which artists and recipients share the necessary
common ground to grasp what the objects are about (no radical change in
« interprétant »). The general point is that because Gell remains operating
within these relatively closed rings of perpetual participation and mutual
understanding, the problem that indexicality is different and more complex
than the referential properties of the Gellian index, is not felt.
Once the theoretical (« anthropological ») excess is exposed as such
and the theory of social semiosis and objectification freed from its weight, I
believe the way is open for contemporary anthropologists to engage with
what is reconstructed as a middle-ground theory of the meaningful
functioning of social objects within and through historical localities. This
falls nothing short of what Parmentier (1997b) and Bryson (1991, p. 73)
suggest to call a « pragmatics » of art.
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