10.13135/2036-542X/7599
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2036-542X
7599
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Jerrold Levinson
Trópos
Indication, Abstraction and Individuation
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
4
Monografica
2012-04-01
2023-05-21
2012-04-01
2023-05-22
121-131
1
Jerrold Levinson
2011
10.13135/2036-542X/7599
121
University of Maryland
2036-542X
2
en
131
Indication, Abstraction and Individuation
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7599/6334
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                                                                   isbn 978-88-548-4716-3 – ISSN 2036-542X-11002
                                                                         doi 10.4399/97888548471638 – pp. 121-132




                Indication, Abstraction,
                   and Individuation
                                  Jerrold Levinson
                                 University of Maryland




Abstract: Roughly thirty years ago, as part of an exploration of the ontol-
  ogy of art, I suggested that musical works (and implicitly, also literary works) were
  not pure abstract structures, like geometrical forms, but instead impure indicat-
  ed structures. However, what exactly does that mean? In the present paper I revisit
  that old idea of mine in the hope of clarifying it somewhat, before then using it as a
  springboard to discussion of artistic indication as a singular psychological act, of the
  individuation of indicated objects that results from such indication, of the relation be-
  tween artistic indication and neighboring sorts of action – what we might call ac-
  tions of simple indication – and finally, of the indication that musical and literary
  artworks effect, as opposed to the indication by which they are created.

Keywords: Ontology of art, music, creation, indication, types.




    1. Roughly thirty years ago, as part of an exploration of the ontology of
art, I suggested that musical works were not pure abstract structures, like geo-
metrical forms, but rather, impure indicated structures (see Levinson 1980; and
also Levinson 1990b). But what exactly does that mean? In the present paper
I propose to revisit that old idea of mine in the hope of clarifying it, before
then using it as a springboard to discussion of artistic indication as a singular
psychological act, of the individuation of indicated objects that results from
such indication, and finally, of the relation between artistic indication and
neighboring sorts of action, what we might call actions of simple indication.
    It is necessary, before we start, to briefly explain why it is that musical
works – and by the same token, literary works – cannot be considered to be
pure tonal or verbal structures. For instance, why it is that Shelley’s famous
poem Ozymandias cannot be reduced to the sequence of words: ‘I’ ‘met’ ‘a’
‘traveler’ ‘from’ ‘an’ ‘antique’ ‘land…,’ and why it is that Chopin’s Mazurka
in A minor Op. 17, no. 4 cannot be reduced to a complex sequence of notes
starting with an altered F major triad. Here are the most important reasons

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why such works cannot be reduced to pure structures. First, pure structures
of elements, which are more or less mathematical objects, cannot be created
– they exist at all times –, but works of art, and that includes musical and
literary works, surely are created, by specific artists working in definite his-
torical contexts. Second, works of art have a number of important aesthetic
and artistic properties that they could not have were they pure structures
existing atemporally, with no essential links to creative artists, preceding art-
works, preceding artistic movements, and more generally, surrounding cul-
tural environments. All this was shown, quite conclusively I think, in Jorge
Luis Borges’ brilliant short story Pierre Menard, author of the “Quixote” and,
in the philosophy of art, through a number of important writings by Ernst
Gombrich (1963), Richard Wollheim (1968), Kendall Walton (1970), Arthur
Danto (1981), Gregory Currie (1989), and Jacques Morizot (1999), to cite
but a few authors. A musical or literary work, though it is partly defined by
its tonal or verbal structure, is nonetheless, like a pictorial or sculptural work,
a particular human creation. It came into being at a certain time; it may be
destroyed in the future if the conditions for its existence cease to obtain; and
it gets its meaning and produces its effects on us not simply in virtue of its
abstract perceptible form, but in virtue of its status as a statement, expression,
or utterance arising in or emerging from a singular generative context. A
Beethoven sonata would not say the same things, musically speaking, if we
thought it to be a work by Brahms, a Jane Austen novel would not com-
municate the same message if we considered it to be a heavily ironic Woody
Allen production, and an expressionistic painting by the young Mondrian
would certainly look much different if we saw it as a work painted sixty
years later by a mature Jackson Pollock.
    This is roughly why musical and literary works cannot be pure or eternal
structures, but must rather be considered instead as impure, historically con-
ditioned, temporally anchored, structures. I suggested that such works are
really what I call indicated structures, which are partly abstract sorts of object,
the result of the interaction between a person and an entirely abstract struc-
ture, such as a sequence or series of words or notes.The interaction in ques-
tion is precisely an act of indicating, and it is this action that creates the link
between the abstract structure and the concrete individual human that lies
at the heart of such an artwork. A paradigmatic musical work, for instance,
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is therefore a tonal-structure-as-indicated-by-
a-specific-composer-in-a-specific-historical-context;1 similarly, a paradig-
    1
      I here leave aside, as regards standard musical works, that such a work arguably has as its core
not simply a tonal structure, but rather, a tonal-instrumental structure. I do so because my concern in
this essay is narrowly the role of indication, in the sense I try to elucidate, in the generation of certain

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matic literary work, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is a verbal-structure-
as-indicated-by-a-specific-author-in-a-specific-historical-context.2
    The hyphens employed in the above formulation are not idle. They are
meant to draw attention to the particular sort of entity that comes into ex-
istence through the structure-indicating actions in question. So for instance,
it is not the case that what it is to be Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is to simply
be a tonal structure S that is indicated by a specific composer C in a specific
historical context H. Rather, what it is to be Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is
to be the indicated structure S-C-H, an object distinct from any tonal struc-
ture simpliciter, though an object into which a specific tonal structure enters
essentially.
    I know that to describe the act through which an artist creates a work
of art in music and literature as an act of indication might seem odd. I must
therefore say a few words about the kind of indication I mean. Of course,
when composers or writers are creating works, they probably don’t take
themselves to be indicating, and probably they don’t take their acts of crea-
tion to be fundamentally acts of indication. More likely they would be
tempted to describe what they are doing as making, as expressing, as for-
mulating, as narrating, and there are no reasons to deny that these do apply
here as well, at least generally. But it remains true that what these symphon-
ists and poets are doing, at least most saliently, is indicating, from among all
those available in a given a language or tonal system, the notes or words that
will, arranged in a certain order, constitute the symphony or poem that is
theirs.
    Naturally, the kind of indication I am discussing here, which we can label
artistic indication, and through which musical and literary works come to be,
should be distinguished from more ordinary kinds of indication, which we
can label simple indication. For example, if I notice something of interest in
the street while on a bus, I may point to it so my traveling companion will
attend to it. This is quite a common type of indication, but not the sort of
indication that creates artworks. Or if in the midst of a conversation I make
reference to this or that person, there is a sense in which I indicate him or
her, yet I surely do not create either of the people I indicated, nor do I even
create a partly abstract object of which they would be constituents. Or, if I

sorts of artworks, and not the debate between sonicists and instrumentalists as to whether performing
means are essential to standard musical works.
   2
      A similar complication might also be observed in the case of standard literary works, whether
poems or novels. Their core structure is not simply a verbal one, if that be understood as merely a se-
quence of words or sentences, but such a sequence partitioned into lines, stanzas, paragraphs, chapters,
and the like. Such a core structure might perhaps be labeled a verbal-segmental structure.

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find myself facing a waitress in a restaurant and I nod my head at the black-
board special that I want to order, again, I indicate, but I do not thereby
bring something new into existence merely in virtue of my act of indica-
tion.3 The same can be said for any usual everyday action whose purpose
it is to draw someone’s attention to some thing or other. In all such cases,
the indication in play is not plausibly one that thereby brings into existence
some thing that didn’t exist before.
    So the specific nature of the indication that lies at the heart of the cre-
ating act, whether in music or in literature, needs to be identified. Let us,
then, compare the indication in operation in the creating of a musical work,
say Chopin’s Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, no. 4, and a perfectly ordinary act
of indication, say that of drawing my friend’s attention to a strange passerby
on the street. We’ll start with this second indication: I notice the strange
person walking along; I then point my finger toward him so my friend will
turn her gaze in his direction. In other words, I indicate, or point to, this
unknown individual, singling him out as something worthy of attention. If
my friend does indeed look at him as a result of my pointing gesture, then
my act of indication has succeeded; if my friend doesn’t look, then my act
of indication has failed, which is not to say that it never occurred. The ac-
tion is purely transitory; it is tightly bound up with a fleeting situation, one
that dissolves almost as soon as it comes to be. The action exhausts itself in
the moment, and doesn’t aim at anything permanent. My goal is simply to
draw my friend’s attention, here and now, to the passing phenomenon, and
there is no goal beyond that. I am not engaged in an activity that is future-
oriented, I have no intention to establish or to build anything, I have no
desire to leave any traces, however small, on the sands of time. At any rate,
such unconcern about what might follow or issue from my act of indication
is characteristic of indication in the ordinary, non-artistic sense.
    Something quite different goes on in artistic indication. What is Chopin
doing, by contrast, when he composes the short but magnificent and heart-
rending Mazurka in A minor? There is a sense in which he too – using his
fingers, whether he inks the notes or plays them on the piano – is engaged
in indication. And what he indicates, in a particular order, are certain in-
dividuals of the tonal realm that existed before the act of composition. In
this case, there is indeed an act, or rather many acts, of simple indication by
which Chopin draws our attention ultimately to a certain tonal configura-
   3
      The qualification ‘merely in virtue of my act of indication’ is important, since an act of ordinary
indication can clearly bring another event into existence in a straightforwardly causal way. For instan-
ce, my indicating something of interest to my companion can bring about the event of her being
aware of the thing in question.

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tion that was there before, hidden in the tonal domain as a field of possible
sounds. But Chopin does more than that when he is composing, because
his intention is indeed to leave a mark of some sort on the world, to insert
something new into the musical culture that precedes and surrounds him.
    So what exactly does Chopin do above and beyond simple indication
when he creates his Mazurka? We can start by noticing that he chooses or
selects notes – here including pitches, rhythms, timbres, and dynamics, and
from both vertical and horizontal perspectives – he doesn’t merely draw
attention to them. That is to say, Chopin has a certain attitude – in part ap-
proval, in part appropriation – toward those particular notes. He doesn’t in
effect merely say: ‘here are some sounds;’ but rather, ‘here are some sounds,
they are now specifically mine, I embrace them, and in this exact sequence.’
When we simply indicate, say by physically pointing or by referring in con-
versation, we do not take that perspective with regard to the object targeted;
we don’t choose it, we don’t select it, we don’t designate it as something that
henceforth has an enduring relation to ourselves.
    But in creating his mazurka Chopin doesn’t just choose or select a se-
quence of notes which he thus puts in a special relationship with himself. If
he were simply improvising, that might suffice as a description of his activity.
However, as a composer of a work for performance, or possible future instan-
tiation, he aims in addition to establish something by that very choice or se-
lection: and what he establishes is a rule, a norm, a miniature practice, whereby
pianists play a piece by Chopin and not just any piece of music when they
play that sequence of notes chosen by Chopin, and do so precisely because
that sequence was chosen by Chopin. That’s what makes the Mazurka in
A minor exist as a work by Chopin. To indicate, as a composer, a particular
sequence of notes consists precisely in establishing a rule to reproduce the
sounds in a certain way following the indications of a particular, historically-
situated musical mind. And it is as such an indicated structure that we can
identify a classical musical work.
    This idea of compositional indication as an action of establishing a rule
was well-expressed by Nicholas Wolterstorff in a 1987 essay:

   A work of music, then, involves a complex interplay among three sorts of enti-
   ties: a performance-kind, a set of correctness and completeness rules, and a set of
   sounds and ways of making them such that the rules specify those as the ones to
   be exemplified […]. Once we see the contribution of rules to the constitution of
   music, it becomes apparent that the three-phase model of composition [invention,
   evaluation, selection] is deficient when it comes to music. Invention is of course
   still involved, as is evaluation. So too is selection. But the process of selection is now
   ancillary to the distinct action of ordaining rules for correctness and completeness.

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                                     Jerrold Levinson

   In light of his evaluation, the composer selects a set of sounds and ways of making
   those sounds; but he does this in the course of ordaining a rule to the effect that
   exemplifying those sounds and those actions is necessary for a complete and correct
   performance (Wolterstorff 1994: 120).


    The key idea in the above formulation is that of ordaining a rule to be
followed by performers wishing to instantiate or perform a given work,
but clearly this is just a more forceful, more sacerdotal variant of the idea,
already mentioned, of establishing such a rule. And this is an element essential
to artistic indication, one that serves to distinguish it from indication of the
mundane sort.
    Let us take stock: artistic indication, unlike simple indication, normally
involves a deliberate choice, an act of appropriation, an attitude of approval, and
the establishment of a rule or norm. But it is now time for us to explore the
way in which artistic indication creates a link between the abstract tonal or
verbal world and a concrete individual human being, in other words, to ex-
plore how this act serves to individuate the tones or words that it recruits for
its creative and expressive ends. We often say, pre-theoretically, that a sonata
is composed of tones, and that a poem is composed of words, albeit ordered
in a certain way, and indeed there is some rough truth to these claims. But
to be more accurate, the flatted F major triad that opens the Mazurka Op.
17, no. 4, or the word ‘traveler’ in the first line of Ozymandias, aren’t compo-
nents of these works that serve to identify them as such, components that
would distinguish them from possible works that resemble them, at least
superficially, to the point of being perceptually indiscernible from them.The
story of Pierre Menard and ‘his’ Quixote clearly shows that works that are
perceptually indiscernible are not necessarily identical; in fact, such works
can be dramatically different in meaning, significance, or content.Therefore,
even a given series or configuration of notes or words, however complex it
may be, is not sufficient to fix or uniquely individuate the musical or literary
work in question.This individuation must rather rest on the unique identity
of the artist who, in the interests of self-expression, combines these brute
elements – abstract notes or – in a specific creative context, and who then
ends up combined with them, so to speak, in the resulting work.
    It is for this reason that the true identifying elements of such works aren’t
really the purely abstract tones and words that the artist uses or appropri-
ates in fashioning his or her work but, as it were, those tones and words
as-indicated-by-this-artist-in-his-or-her-singular-artistic-situation. The elements of
the work so understood in effect guarantee that the work really is the work
of that artist, and it is by indicating, in the sense I have been trying to make

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clear, the abstract elements of a given language or system, that the artist
brings into being these half-abstract and half-concrete entities that I call
indicated structures.The indicated structures are more individual, more per-
sonalized, we might say, than the pure structures that can, unlike indicated
structures, be part of any work of any artist. Again, only the indicated struc-
ture, not the pure structure, can be created by the artist. Only that structure,
and not the purely abstract one whose existence predates that of the artist
himself or herself, can have the aesthetic, expressive, and semantic properties
proper to the work of art as such.
    Having somewhat clarified, at least in a contrastive manner, the nature
of the indication involved in the creation of indicated-structures, I must
now take note of a difficulty concerning the type status of such entities. Is
an indicated-structure, that is, a structural-type-as-indicated-in-a-context,
itself strictly speaking a type? Well, odd as it may seem, perhaps not, and for
the following reason. If, as many philosophers maintain, types are wholly
defined in terms of essential properties, ones that must be possessed by any
token of the type, and if, in addition, such properties, even when relational,
are held to be eternal, and so not subject to creation, then types will also be
eternal, and equally not subject to creation.4 But that is precisely the oppo-
site of what indicated-structures and initiated-types are supposed to be, and
so insisting that they are types would undermine one of the main motiva-
tions for introducing them. Thus, perhaps the act of artistic indication that
operates on a preexisting structural type and yields an indicated-structure or
initiated-type should not be conceived as having, as output, a type tout court.
    But if initiated-types are not, sensu strictu, types after all, then what are
they? One possibility would be to assimilate them to qua objects, items such
as Obama-as-President, or Venus-as-seen-from-Earth.5 However, that is not
a happy suggestion, for at least two reasons. One is that it would render
initiated-types too insubstantial, too aspectual, and thus poor candidates for
creation in a robust sense.Two is that the qua object model seems inadequate
to capture the intuition that in creating a musical work of the standard sort
one is constituting it from or making it out of some preexistent sound struc-
ture.6 Be that as it may, if initiated-types are then neither types as classically

   4
      An argument of this sort has been offered in Dodd 2000 and Dodd 2002. For discussion and
partial defusing of the argument, see Howell 2002. What I call indicated-types Howell there calls types-
in-use, and the reservations aired here as to whether indicated-types are finally properly thought of as
types would apply equally well to Howell’s types-in-use.
    5
      A theory of qua objects is worked out in detail in Fine 1982.
    6
      This is convincingly argued in Evnine 2009. Evnine also articulates an attractive positive con-
ception of what the work of making a musical work involves, a conception not far removed from
that of artistic indication as elaborated in the present essay: “The labour, in the case of composition,

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                                              Jerrold Levinson

defined, nor qua objects, they are nonetheless recognizably what Wollheim
called generic entities, that is, things that can have instances and that can be ex-
emplified in a concrete manner. In the case of musical initiated-types, such
instantiation-exemplification occurs through musical performance.7
   That there is perhaps, at bottom, not that much of an issue here is nicely
formulated in a recent essay by Robert Stecker on the methodology of the
ontology of art:

    Some believe that types are by definition eternal and unchanging (Rohrbaugh,
    Dodd), and others think that at least some types are created and are subject to
    change and can cease to exist (Levinson, Howell, Thomasson). On this latter issue
    it seems to me that there is no real dispute other than a dispute over which entities
    should be called ‘types.’ As long as one can give a consistent, intelligible description
    of a kind of entity, it is not important what we call it (Stecker 2009: 385).8



    2. In the rest of this essay I address three further questions, ones concern-
ing the sorts of indication effected by works of art, as opposed to the sort of
indication with which we have so far been concerned, the sort that operates
to create works of art, at least in certain artforms.
    First question: how does a work indicate that it is a work of art, and is thus
to be appreciated as such? A brief answer is this. On the view of arthood that
I have proposed and defended over the years, a work of art is such – that is, is
a work of art – because it, or the object or event or structure it contains, has
been projected by an artist with a specific intention, that of making it the
case that the work be taken or treated or regarded or engaged with more or
less as some works of art have been taken or treated or regarded or engaged
with in the past.9 It follows immediately that anything can be, or at least can
is not transformative of the sound structure out of which the work is made. But in some looser sense
it is work on that sound structure. It is the work of locating it within the saturated sound space and
distinguishing it from other sound structures.” (Evnine 2009: 215).
     7
       One difficulty, though, surely remains, namely, saying what it is to instantiate the historical-cultural
aspect of an indicated-type. The instantiation of the structural aspect – the sound/performance means
structure or performance-type at the core of the indicated-type – by a concrete performance is a fa-
miliar and relatively unproblematic idea, but instantiation of the other aspect arguably is not. Perhaps
all one can say is that to produce a performance that complies with the structural aspect of a musical
work in a way that is mindful of and conformant with the historical-cultural aspect is thus to instantiate
that aspect as well.
     8
       One might still insist that a reasonable methodological concern remains, namely this: that the
extent to which the kind of entity one posits resists being classified according to the standard me-
taphysical taxonomy is the extent to which the kind of entity posited can seem sui generis or ad hoc.
But in response to that I would point out that it would be surprising if new metaphysical insights or
proposals did not often require such posits. For a judicious review of the pros and cons of conceiving
musical works as types of some sort, see Davies 2011: chapter 2.
     9
       See the relevant essays in Levinson 1990a; Levinson 1996a; and Levinson 2006.

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become, a work of art, if it is simply sincerely and seriously projected in such
a manner, and thus that there are no foolproof external signs that something
presented for our consideration is a work of art.
    That said, some features serve as reliable, if not infallible, signs that what
we are presented with is a work of art. For instance, and confining ourselves
here for simplicity to the visual arts, features such as extraordinary beauty;
striking form; enigmatic appearance; ostensible reference to earlier artworks;
employment of a traditional artistic medium; a tag or label attaching to the
object; an autograph or signature on the object itself; or finally, location in
an art gallery or exhibition space. In many instances, these are some of the
ways that a visual artwork indicates or signals to us that it is indeed a work
of art.
    Second question: what does a work of art indicate in the world beyond it?
A brief answer is that it indicates as much as can be indicated by any other
symbolic vehicle and, in some respects, rather more. Works of art can in-
dicate worldly objects in many ways: by representing them, by expressing
them, by exemplifying them, by evoking them, by alluding to them, by serv-
ing as metaphors for them, and so on. Works of art sometimes go beyond
these general ways of referring in ways that are more evaluatively loaded,
as with homage, pastiche, parody, satire, burlesque, or caricature. Of course,
the question of what exactly works of art indicate about the world outside
them, in how many registers or modes, and with what import for their
overall meaning, cannot adequately be answered short of a study in effect
summarizing the whole of art criticism and meta-criticism.
    Third question: what things do works of art enable us to glimpse or
discern without explicitly indicating them? In other words, what do artworks
indicate indirectly, without being meant to, without expressly drawing our
attention to them, and so to speak, in spite of themselves? A brief answer
is that they so indicate many things, and possibly more than they directly
indicate. In some sense, artworks indicate indirectly whatever one can rea-
sonably conjecture, given the work and the artistic context in which it was
created, about the creator and the process of creation. That is to say, works
generally reveal or betray, without aiming to do so, a range of things about
their creators and the processes by which they were created.
    For instance, the way in which a novel was written can tell us much
about the neuroses of its author even if the novel doesn’t depict a neurotic
narrator and doesn’t directly address neurosis. Something of that sort might
be true of Kafka’s The Trial. A symphony, merely by being excessively long,
can convey the difficulty faced by the composer when trying to finish the
composition, even if the symphony does not directly exemplify this dif-

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                                         Jerrold Levinson

ficulty. Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony is perhaps an example of such a work.
The violence of a painting’s facture and the savage character of its forms can
suggest a feeling of self-loathing that the artist himself might not be aware
of, without the painting actually expressing, representing, or symbolizing
that feeling. I am thinking here of some of William’s De Kooning’s paintings
from his Woman series.
    In short, works of art do not only indicate what their creators meant
to convey or communicate, and which in successful cases we understand
above all in engaging with them; they can also indicate much about those
creators and their creative processes that was never meant to be conveyed or
communicated.10 If we label the sort of indication I have been concerned
with in this section work indication, the question can be raised of how work
indication relates to the sort of indication of principal concern in this essay,
namely, artistic indication, that involved in the creation of literary and musi-
cal works of art. We might ask, in particular, if work indication is figurative
indication, while artistic indication is literal indication. I think not. My view
is that both are literal, though of course there are salient differences between
them. First, their agents are different, artists in the one case, and artworks in
the other case. Second, the agency involved is different, being immediate in
one case, and mediated in the other. That is to say, the author or composer
directly performs actions that constitute the selectings, fixings, and ordain-
ings identified earlier as central to literary and musical artmaking, the artist’s
agency not being dependent on that of other agents, whereas their artworks
perform (or ‘perform’) actions only in virtue of having been constituted
as artifacts of a certain sort by their creators. Finally, the action involved in
work indication, if not quite figurative, is admittedly action in a weaker sense
than that involved in artistic indication, one that does not imply will, in-
tentionality, or goal-directedness, and amounting, more or less, to bringing
about an effect or result.11
    In conclusion: the work of art, and more specifically, the musical or liter-
ary work of art, can be considered a site where several kinds of indication
intersect. There is, on the one hand, the kind of indication performed by the
artist, which makes the work what it is, through transforming an ensemble
of abstract tonal or verbal elements into an individualized such ensemble,
one tied essentially to the artist himself or herself. On the other hand, there
is the kind of indication performed by the work, which encompasses all of

  10
      For related reflections on what artworks indicate directly and indirectly, see Levinson 1996b.
  11
      It is in that respect similar to the sort of action invoked when speaking of the gravitational
action of one mass on another or of the action of sulfuric acid on susceptible metals.

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what the work signifies, in a wide sense, about the world and the artist, di-
rectly or indirectly, and for better or for worse.
                                                           august@umd.edu


Bibliographical References

Currie, G., 1989, An Ontology of Art, London, Macmillan.
Danto, A., 1981, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge (MA),
   Harvard University Press.
Davies, D., 2011, Philosophy of the Performing Arts, Oxford, Blackwell.
Dodd, J., 2000, Musical Works As Eternal Types, “British Journal of Aesthetics,”
   40, pp. 424-440.
Dodd, J., 2002, Defending Musical Platonism, “British Journal of Aesthetics,”
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