I. Behavior, Language, Sign, and Their Cultural Conventions
In "Semiotic Modeling and Aesthetic Creation," we specially expounded the three sequences of symbolic modeling: behavior-modeling, language-modeling, and the modeling of other signs. Behavior-modeling is formed in the process by which the organism deals with the world; it is the "relational model" that the organism constructs in connecting with the world. This relational model fuses organism and world into one and lets them mutually adapt; it both endows the world with a life-structure and sediments into the organism's own unconscious experience, forming the organism's instinct. Humanity inherited this precious gift of the organism. Language-modeling, by contrast, is built on the basis of behavior-modeling; it is the classification, condensation, and abstraction of unconscious experience, thereby forming "concepts" possessing extension and intension, forming the "concept / sound-image" language. This is an enormous leap. Language-modeling enjoys relative independence, and this brings about a substantive change in the relational model of human and world. While establishing the connection between human and world, it at the same time differentiates human from world and differentiates the myriad things from one another, and goes on to construct human consciousness and the object of consciousness; and so a clarified world is born (Ma Dakang 178–190). Insofar as language and consciousness are formed synchronously, language-modeling itself is already symbolic activity in Peirce's sense—that is, the speech-act.
Language possesses the capacity for objectification and thereby possesses the capacity for symbolization. Language can forcibly strip behavior (gesture, action, expression) from the human body and regard and interpret it as an "object," and so behavior becomes a sign representing unconscious experience. One may say that it is precisely because of the birth of language and consciousness that behavior-modeling is transformed into what Peirce calls a "sign," which we call "behavior-language." From this point, language-modeling, hand in hand with behavior-modeling, jointly constructs all other signs.
The three different types of sign have different modes of enactment and characteristics: the speech-act constructs the "objective relation" between human and world, and this dyadic relation can grasp the world through observation, analysis, and cognition, upon which human consciousness, spirit, and reason are founded; behavior-language constructs the "non-objective relation," and this monadic relation can grasp the world only with the aid of lived experience, intuition, and comprehension, constructing unconscious experience, shaping the body, and directly embodying the form of emotion and the form of life; and because the other signs are jointly constructed by behavior-modeling and language-modeling, they possess both of these two utterly different yet complementary natures and can ultimately be interpreted by the tension-relation between the speech-act and behavior-language. Behind the human's sensation and feeling there lurks precisely the process of symbolic modeling, which employs all the various types of sign to grasp the world and to construct the possible world of literature and art.
All symbolic activity depends, to differing degrees, on cultural conventions (social conventions); otherwise the sign loses its function of social communication. This convention is not a rule prescribed by explicit clauses but an exemplar formed in the process of symbolic practice. In literary-artistic activity, although symbolic convention is, at its source, inseparable from life-practice, it directly draws on the exemplars constituted by the literary-artistic paradigms recognized within the art world. Every writer and artist understands the paradigm in his own way, selects and shares conventions, and makes paradigm and convention form a tension-relation, thereby inheriting the literary-artistic tradition. When a writer or artist, in a distinctive way, challenges the established convention, remolds it, even produces a certain rupture, and then gains the recognition of some writers and artists, forming a new literary-artistic community and gradually renewing the symbolic convention, a new literary-artistic style and school is born. But when the renewal of cultural convention involves not merely the style of works but the basic concepts and institutions of literature and art—that is, when this change does not stop at the level of symbolic convention but penetrates the speech-act behind the sign, remaking literary-artistic concepts and institutions through declarative acts, altering the speech-act paradigm, adjusting the tension-structure between the speech-act and behavior-language, and changing the "modeling" mode behind sensation and feeling—it will shift the human's attention, reconstruct the human's sensory configuration, reshape the human's sense organs, and produce major events in the development of literature and art.
II. Sign, Ritual, Literature and Art
In Ancient Art and Ritual, Harrison traced the common root of art and ritual, holding that both stem from the intense desire for life to die and be reborn, and that the two have an "undivided" symbiotic relation. She points out: "Art does not directly stem from life itself, but from the collective appeal-activity of the human group for the needs and desires of life—namely, so-called ritual." (Harrison 134)
The "Ancient Music" chapter of Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals records: "In ancient times, when Zhu Xiang-shi governed the world, there was much wind and the yang-ether accumulated; the myriad things scattered and dissolved, and the fruits did not ripen. Therefore Shi Da made the five-stringed se to summon the yin-ether and settle all living beings. In the music of the ancient Ge Tian-shi, three men held oxtails and stamped their feet while singing eight stanzas: the first called 'Bearing the People,' the second 'The Dark Bird,' the third 'Making Grasses and Trees Flourish,' the fourth 'Invigorating the Five Grains,' the fifth 'Revering the Constancy of Heaven,' the sixth 'Establishing the Sovereign's Merit,' the seventh 'Relying on the Virtue of Earth,' the eighth 'Gathering the Utmost of Birds and Beasts.'" (Gao, Bi, and Xu 101) The poetry, music, song, and dance of antiquity were used in ritual activity, with which to communicate between gods and humans and to harmonize Heaven and Earth, yin and yang; and they could be collectively termed "yue" (music). The "Record of Music" in The Book of Rites says: "Thus, listening to the sounds of the 'Ya' and 'Song,' the will and intent are broadened. Grasping the shield and battle-axe and practicing the bowing and rising, the bending and stretching, one's bearing becomes dignified. Moving through the dance-positions and keeping to the rhythm, the ranks become correct and the advancing and retreating become uniform. Therefore music is the mandate of Heaven and Earth, the cord of central harmony, that which human feeling cannot do without." (Hu and Zhang 758) The so-called "yue" refers not merely to "music" in the modern sense but simultaneously contains poetry, music, and dance, and bears the meanings of "making Heaven and Earth harmonious" and "making the human (or god) joyful and gaining something (virtue)." As for exquisite ornamental images, these appeared mainly on the ritual vessels used in ceremony. Therefore, what we today call literature and art was originally tightly combined around ritual activity, coexisting in multiple modalities, closely related to human existential activity, and possessed of a definite utilitarian purposiveness. "Empathy" and "transference" were its main characteristics—that is, behavior-language occupied the dominant position, causing the ritual participants to throw themselves into it wholly and fuse into one.
If we inquire further—how is ritual constructed, and what is its basis?—then we cannot but return to humanity's activity of symbolic modeling. Human cultural activity is itself symbolic activity, and all signs are built on the basis of behavior-modeling and language-modeling, the fruit of the cooperation of the two; therefore they can ultimately be explained by the tension-relation between the two. On one hand, behavior-modeling forcefully runs through and fuses human and world, bestowing the human's life-structure upon the world; on the other, language-modeling differentiates human from world and sets the world up as the human's object of consciousness. Through the joint action of this double modeling, the object-world has already become an anthropomorphized, vitalized world, and the object, because it enjoys vitality and possesses mysterious power, is transformed into the supreme "god." This is the pantheist world in which the myriad things are gods. Ritual is the particular behavioral program that humanity established in order to survive, to pray to and make use of the gods; chanting, singing, and dancing are offerings to the gods and pleas to them, different types of symbolic construction—only that they are still organic constituent parts of primitive ritual, collective activities in which all members jointly participate and experience, from which no "spectator" has yet differentiated out so as to become literature and art in the modern sense.
In The Social History of Art, Hauser goes further in distinguishing magic from ritual and makes a comparative analysis of the naturalistic images of the Paleolithic and the geometric style of the Neolithic. He holds that the Paleolithic was still under the cover of magical notions; people had not yet conceived the notion of gods, the boundary between art and reality was blurred, the image was the real object, a means of working magic, and magic's manipulation of the image was the use of magical power to manipulate the real object itself—the two were identical. This also required that the artistic style be naturalistic, that a skilled magician make it, and the process of imitation itself had a magical function. In the Neolithic, farming and herding replaced hunting; scattered groups changed their leaderless state and gathered into more concentrated, unified-leadership communities; animism became the dominant worldview; worship and sacrifice replaced magic; the image gradually evolved into a symbolic image; and the style tended toward formalization and abstraction. "The magical worldview is monistic; in its view, all the myriad things of the real world are closely linked, a continuum without gap or leap. Animism is a dualistic worldview that brings knowledge and belief into a system composed of two worlds. Magic has a sensationalist tendency and focuses on concrete things; animism has a dualistic tendency and favors abstract thinking. The former is concerned with this shore, the latter with the other shore. It is precisely for this reason that Paleolithic art imitates life and reality, while Neolithic art shapes a transcendent world that is stylized and idealized and opposed to empirical reality." (Hauser 11)
Hauser interprets the evolution of primitive art well, from the angle of changes in the human existential state; but if we combine it with changes in the two-dimensional tension-structure of the sign-system, we can more clearly see the elements implicit behind it. Magic is humanity's early wisdom. The arising of language had only just broken through chaos and ignorance and opened human consciousness. But in the overall structure of symbolic activity, because behavior-modeling still occupied an overwhelming position, the human could hardly extricate himself from monism; he had not yet wholly transcended the chaotic world, still less enjoyed the metaphysical world constructed by language, and had not truly enjoyed spiritual life—the myriad things were still linked, entangled, and mutually resonant. This was still only a magical world. Only when the community expanded and increasingly stressed the importance of linguistic communication, and language increasingly strengthened its conventionality and relative independence, did it gradually seize its due power. The relative independence of language gave it the ability to transcend reality and construct a metaphysical world. And so not only were human and thing, thing and thing, clearly differentiated, but the empirical world and the transcendent world, the visible world and the invisible world of spirits, body and soul, also split apart. The former is directly experienceable by the body; the latter is mainly language's reconstruction of experience, experienceable only through imagination. Although behavior-modeling projected the human's own image onto the real object and endowed the object with vitality, it was already powerless to thoroughly heal the distance between the two sides, and could only have language-modeling set it up as a god hidden behind the real object, lofty and high above. This is the pantheist world—a world of gods that both possess mysterious power and dwell close at hand, near at every moment; a world that needs the ritual of worship to sustain the confidence to survive. At the same time, language also generalizes and abstracts the concrete image, making "art" tend toward conceptualization, stylization, and universalization.
Language is differentiation, is abstraction. Once humanity enjoyed language, it could never again halt its own pace of rationalization. As the speech-act grew increasingly strong in the tension-structure of the sign-system, it inevitably propelled humanity to differentiate and know the world continually, making the originally fused world grow ever more clarified, human reason ever sounder, and the coherent state of thing-and-self-as-one undergo thorough disintegration. The splitting of human and world, and the human's cognition of the world, in turn gradually dissolved the mysterious and expelled the gods. The gods began to withdraw from the world of things and flee into an unreachable, unknowable world. This is the "disenchantment of the world," and also the fundamental cause of the demise of primitive ritual. And so the chanting, singing, and dancing in ritual, because of their emotion-arousing, people-pleasing function, drifted into the folk; they were no longer offered only to the gods but became mainly the art of humanity's own viewing and enjoyment. Having lost the support of ritual, the bond maintaining the various art types was doomed to break, and the mutually intermingling relation of the arts disintegrated. Ornamental images, because they were attached to an independent material carrier, were inevitably the easiest to separate from ritual.
Plato's contradictory attitude toward literature and art stemmed precisely from his being situated in a rationalizing age in which ritual was gradually disintegrating. As for literature and art as an organic part of ritual, Plato greatly esteemed them, holding that the poet could thereby enter a state of ecstasy and communicate with the gods, and thereby grasp truth. Yet as for what had degenerated into entertainment for spectators, he held that literature and art were a clumsy imitation that should be expelled from the ideal republic. Plato's self-contradictory dualistic attitude precisely displays the long transitional stage in which literature and art detached from ritual and entered folk entertainment.
In Daily Understanding, Gu Yanwu says: "He who sings makes poetry; he who strikes, pats, or blows makes the instruments; spoken of together, they are called 'music.' Spoken of in contrast with poetry, then what is called 'music' is as in 'the eight tones arise from poetry, are established in rites, and completed in music'—this speaks of poetry and music separately. To speak of music alone, with poetry contained within it, is as in 'After I returned from Wei to Lu, the music was set right, and the Ya and the Song each found their proper place'—this speaks of poetry and music together." (Gu Yanwu 228) He also says: "The three hundred pieces of the Songs could all be set to tones and made into music. From the Han onward, the five-character verse and the like were taken as 'mere poetry' (tu shi), while those harmonized with tones were called yuefu. From the Song onward, what was called yuefu likewise only imitated the diction and was no different from mere poetry; thereupon poetry and music were sharply divided into two, and not only did music perish, but poetry too perished." (Gu Yanwu 226–227)
Confucius lived precisely in the age of "the collapse of rites and the ruin of music." The royal authority of Zhou declined, the bonds of the kingly order loosened, ritual waned, and the institution of collecting songs lost its importance, so that poetry, music, and dance scattered and dispersed. Hence Mencius says: "When the traces of the [true] kings were extinguished, the Songs perished." The so-called "Confucius's editing of the Songs" on one hand collected and preserved the scattered poems; on the other, it laid the groundwork for the splitting of poetry and song. Although the Book of Songs was still sung by people and could be set to music, its long textualized transmission over time could not but make poetry gradually forget music. "The Songs perished, and then the Spring and Autumn Annals were made" (Yang Bojun 177) precisely means that poetry declined along with the lapse of ritual, and so the historical works that recorded and regulated behavior stole the important position of poetry. The rise of written culture further debased the status of poetry, which depended on oral chant, and led to the birth of the prose-ized Spring and Autumn Annals. By the time the Han dynasty invented paper, the Tang selected officials by poetry, and the Song saw the appearance of printing, writing-culture and print-culture increasingly spread and prevailed; materialized characters became an important, indirect medium of communication, and poetry finally, by degrees, became independent from the unity of poetry-music-song-dance and became "mere poetry," while a special mode of artistic reception, "reading," also transcended the practical utility of the written character and increasingly highlighted its importance in artistic perception. At first, poetry, as a ritual dedicatory text, was the core and soul of poetry-music-song-dance; the departure of poetry thus led to the mutual splitting of song, music, and dance. Although in the folk the various arts still remained entangled, this separation was mainly confined to the elite culture, because the written character was possessed only by a small number of literati; yet it had an enormous influence on the direction of literature and art. Behind this cultural change, there again lurked the written character's fostering of human reason. The flourishing of writing-culture accelerated the human's process of rationalization.
In discussing the development of human reason, Vernant points out the importance of language's shift from the oral to the written. He holds that in oral civilization, poetry, as a rhythmic, dance-accompanying song, occupied the front of the intellectual stage. "This oral system is built on the basis of a kind of sympathetic activity that makes the audience, as if bewitched, moved by the passion revealed in the verses." The appearance of prose was a major change; it signified the transformation from oral song to written work. This was a fundamental shift. Written writing not only initiated a new mode of discursive logic but also a new mode of communication between author and public. The written work can be read repeatedly and to some degree stimulates critical reflection. "Thereby people no longer place pure chaos at the origin, no longer let a supreme being who imposes order be born in this chaos, but explore what the origins of things are, or what the originary principle (Principe) underlying all things is." (Vernant 240–241) With its materiality, durability, and indirectness, the written character changed the directness, on-the-spot presence, and fleeting character of oral language, strengthened the independence of language, and effectively opened up the distance between human and language, between human and his own thought, and between human and the world that language constructs, so that critical reflection became possible. In this process, mythical narration based on empathy gradually declined, a wholly new, objectivizing kind of statement was born, human reason grew, and narration—because the sanctity of old was receding—took on the dust of the human world. The process of rationalization inevitably led to the subdivision of the domains of human activity, to the demarcation of disciplinary boundaries, and also to the division of different art types and the division of labor among the sense organs.
The birth of human reason strangled the various gods, yet it could not erase humanity's own unconscious experience, could not erase behavior-language memory, could not eliminate the cohesive force that runs through and fuses human and world. Only that these no longer serve as the basis of ritual activity but become the necessary condition of literary-artistic activity, and under the illumination of reason gradually lose their sanctity. It is precisely behavior-language memory, hidden in the depths of the unconscious, that stores the most profound existential experience; and it is precisely the cohesive power of behavior-language to make human and world coherent that endows literature and art with their boundless, rapturous charm and their unsayable, lingering flavor. The deep cooperation of the speech-act and behavior-language opens up an imagined world in which humanity's deepest, most ancient, yet most vivid experience flourishes.
In literary-artistic activity, the tension-relation formed by the deep fusion of the speech-act and behavior-language keeps the relation between the creator (or appreciator) and the aesthetic world always in a tension-relation and a transitional state—now dyadic, now monadic. In analyzing artistic activity, Merleau-Ponty tried to heal the split state of seeing and being seen, grasping and being grasped, recording and being recorded, subject and object; he regarded activity and passivity as an undivided, indistinguishable coexistence, regarded creation as "letting being be," or as the "hollow opening" opening itself, as our fleshly encounter with the world, highlighting the fleshliness of art, in order to overcome the dualistic opposition. In essence, Merleau-Ponty never truly leaped out of the trap of subject-object dualism. The relation between human and the artistic world is extremely complex and changeable; the two sides are both dyadic and monadic, at every moment in a tension-relation and a transitional state.
III. The Virtual Signification of Language and Sign, and the Mechanism of Aesthetic Isolation
In the world where the myriad things are gods, verbal signification pointed to an object in which god and thing were one; but after the disintegration of the god-thing relation, verbal signification split apart: first, pointing to the real material world; second, pointing to unknowable gods—and because chanting, singing, and dancing finally separated from ritual and lost the support of the gods, verbal signification could not but point to nothingness. This is the speech-act with a distinctive signification in literary-artistic activity. The signifying intention of speech finally underwent differentiation. Therefore literature and art do not "tell lies"; they make no true-or-false judgment—only that their verbal signification no longer refers to a real object but points to nothingness, points to a virtual world, and thereby the virtual signification of speech is born, just what Richards calls a "non-referential pseudo-statement." This dimension of language constructs for humanity a non-real existential dimension, a home in which the spirit can settle and the soul be sheltered.
In everyday activity, people use language to deal with other people and things, and verbal signification is thus inevitably entangled with humans and things, which inevitably makes utilitarian purposiveness hard to avoid. Especially when language constructs interpersonal relations, it always, consciously or unconsciously, brings power into it, constructing relations of interest with illocutionary forces such as command, entreaty, admonition, exhortation, and promise. Yet, once verbal signification signifies nothingness, its utilitarian quality loses its effect, loses its purpose, has nothing to attach to, and cannot but cancel the utilitarian quality of verbal signification itself. Therefore, between the human and the world of the work, the act of virtual signification of speech is itself unrelated to utility. (1)
John Searle made a good analysis of the logical status of fictional discourse. He holds that the assertion in everyday discourse must accord with semantic and pragmatic rules—that is, follow the rules of truthfulness and sincerity—and that these rules constitute the vertical connection between discourse and the real world. Fictional discourse is different. Although fictional discourse must follow horizontal conventions—that is, conventions internal to the organization of language—it suspends the vertical rules connecting discourse to reality, namely truthfulness and sincerity, and lifts the direct connection between discourse and the objective world. "The construction of a fictional work by fictional discourse is made possible by the existence of a set of conventions that suspend the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts to the world." (Searle 67) The significative quality of speech is the conscious intentionality of the language user (creator or appreciator). From the angle of the virtual signification of speech, because it gives up the connection between human and the real world and also loses the connection between human and the world of gods, and reconstructs the connection between human and the fictional world, its real utility and purposiveness are thereby exhausted. Yet, from the angle of fictional discourse's constructing a fictional world, it must comply with the established horizontal conventions; otherwise discourse would lose its structural function and communicative function and lose its intelligibility. And these conventions are themselves shaped over a long process of social communication and cannot but reflect the power-relations of real society. Thus fictional discourse itself embodies a duality: for the language user, it refers to a non-real fictional world and thereby loses utilitarian purposiveness; yet the conventions of discourse itself have long been tainted by power, stained with a utilitarian color, displaying the relations of interest behind discourse. The duality of fictional discourse also determines the dual relation between literature and art and reality: literature and art themselves have no direct utility, but the discursive conventions that constitute them refract the power-relations of reality, refract the inequality of real society, and therefore covertly contain an indirect judgment upon reality.
When language develops the act of virtual signification, it constructs for the human a fictional world—just what Marcuse calls the "other-world," a world in which real repression is lifted and unconscious experience can fully well up, a world in which deep behavior-language memory revives. And so the speech-act and behavior-language deeply fuse, and the aesthetic world of free imagination is born. On one hand, the speech-act, with its signification, differentiates the real world from the fictional world and unfolds a metaphysical spiritual space; on the other, deep behavior-language memory, having gained release, makes human and the fictional world coherent, so that the human cannot but be intoxicated in this fictional world. This is the realm in which the human's unconscious experience fully opens out, the realm permeated with the most originary, most profound existential experience, the realm in which the human experiences his own liberation and freedom, the state in which the human's body is personally on the scene, and also the spiritual state of what Zhuangzi calls "letting the mind roam in the bland." This is not only a major renewal of human sensation but also a major elevation of the mind.
The signification of the sign is closely related to the verbal signification behind it. (2) It is precisely the differentiating function of language, the differentiation of linguistic signification, and the arising of the virtual intention that make aesthetic disinterestedness and the independence of literature and art possible. When the virtual signification of speech lifts the connection between human and reality and points to a fictional world, utilitarian purposiveness has nothing to attach to, and the mechanism of aesthetic isolation is formed. In the process of modernization, when social division of labor and commodity exchange became the most universal form of life, stressing aesthetic disinterestedness and the independence of literature and art became not only a powerful slogan by which writers and artists cast off their subordinate position to religion and the aristocracy but also provided them with an existential strategy for self-preservation and self-respect. The disinterested character of the virtual signification of speech was also one-sidedly stressed. And so literature and art seized the chance to obtain an independent identity, the aesthetic and the everyday attitude finally split apart, and the aesthetic world became an independent spiritual enclave. Only with the coming of postmodern thought, when scholars turned their gaze to the concrete uses of language and to the conventions language follows, did the complex connection between fictional discourse and power again come to light. New Historicism, postcolonialism, feminism, and cultural criticism seized precisely on cultural convention to launch their critique, revealing from it the hidden power that tampers with, distorts, and manipulates convention.
Schiller greatly esteemed aesthetic education. He grieved over the split of human nature brought by social rank and the division of labor: the human is bound to a solitary fragment of the whole and becomes a fragment himself, thereby producing the split among the sensuous and the rational, nature and freedom, diversity and universality. Schiller held that only with the aid of the aesthetic education of literature and art can the human heal the various splits anew and restore the wholeness of human nature. Welsch leveled a severe critique at Schiller's aesthetic view. He denounced Schiller's aesthetic thought as "an anti-sensuous dogmatism," "a dogmatism that eliminates the world," and "an aesthetic dogmatism," and held that the systematic error behind it is a misunderstanding of aesthetic need. This aesthetics "did not develop a strategy of knowing and liberating sensation, but a strategy of controlling, eliminating, and strictly managing sensation. This is the innermost paradox of traditional aesthetics." (Welsch 90) In fact, it is Welsch who misread Schiller. In Schiller's aesthetic thought, human sensibility is placed in an extremely important position. Schiller held that, for humanity as a whole, sensibility "precedes" reason in existing, and that we should "give nature the decisive final say" (Schiller 47). Yet in real society, reason expects too much of the human; it strips away the animality in the human, which amounts to removing, before the law, the natural ladder beneath the human's feet. Therefore art, as the daughter of freedom, must cast off reality, step beyond need, and, in the "play impulse," combine the "sensuous impulse" with the "formal impulse"—what Schiller calls the "zero state" of the aesthetic mood, which is at the same time "the highest state of reality." Schiller's so-called "zero state" is the originary state in which sensibility and reason have not yet split—that is, the state of "sensibility first." In this state, reason is no longer an authoritative force lording it over sensibility but becomes a rational wisdom serving natural sensibility. "Only when his form lives in our feeling and his life takes form in our understanding is he living form." (Schiller 87) Thus the "zero state" of the aesthetic mood must also be "the highest state of reality."
In everyday life, the human cannot possibly be in the "zero state"; he must "cast off reality" and enter the fictional world of the other shore. This is a world of "indeterminacy," and also a world of "infinite possibility of determination." Here, fictional discourse constructs a fictional possible world, describes fictional characters, and endows this world with a certain form, while behavior-language memory thereby gains release; it pours abundant unconscious experience into this fictional world and into the fictional characters, making the image a "living form" that condenses moist existential experience and overflows with the natural sense of life. This is the liberation of sensation and the opening of life, and also the free cooperation of sensibility and reason realized at a brand-new level.
Life is always an acting body, and it is precisely behavior-language that fully embodies life's own natural character. The deep cooperation of behavior-language and the speech-act maintains the unity of body and spirit, sensibility and reason, nature and freedom. On one hand, the human constructs a formal world through the speech-act and understands and interprets this world; he cannot turn his back on logic and reason. On the other, the human also fully mobilizes behavior-language to throw himself into this world and experience it; he returns to the natural state of existence, returns to the body, returns to life itself—and this return endows him with a brand-new standpoint distinct from the everyday state, a standpoint that fully enjoys the freedom of life. When he interprets the world starting from life itself, a profound critique of human nature is generated, and reason too cannot but submit to life and make a self-correction. Literary-artistic activity embodies what Schiller calls "aesthetic education," embodies what Marcuse calls "aesthetic liberation" and the "new sensibility," and promotes the wholeness and perfecting of human nature.
In the course of human development, not only is the material world continually known, exploited, and expanded, but the human's imagination makes the virtual world possess an incomparably powerful expansive force, which, on one side, opens up new territory outside the real world, and, on the other, continually invades the domain of the material world, endowing the material world with an illusory halo.
When we focus our attention on a certain real object, this object can be made to stand out from, even be stripped from, the concrete environment. Cognitive science calls this "the attentional blink and the psychological refractory period." Dehaene says: "Once attention is first concentrated on the prior item of information, we become blind to the other information." (Dehaene 196) This characteristic of attention is inseparable from the signifying intention of speech; it makes the object on which consciousness focuses detach from the functional real environment in which it is situated and stand out, forming what Schopenhauer calls the state of "isolation." This prompts us to build a virtual context to make up for the vacancy, plunging the object into "intertextuality," wreathed in an illusory, dim halo. Our unconscious potential is thereby liberated, and behavior-language memory is revived; they become both the driving force for unfolding imagination and a direct participant in the construction of imagination. As Crary says: "When attention isolates a particular content from a larger field of cognition, this activity of separation can become the beginning of a productive activity." (Crary 107) Therefore, at the moment when Woolf gazes at the "mark on the wall," she opens up a freely unfolding stream of consciousness; associations come crowding involuntarily, carrying her into an imagined virtual world. In this state, the individual has not lost connection with the external world but has changed the mode of connection, changed the mode of feeling: the two-dimensional tension-structure of the sign-system has changed and inverted, behavior-language has once again occupied the dominant position, and gazing has turned into imagination and lived experience.
The expansive force of the virtual world causes the human's aesthetic ability to be greatly excavated. Between everyday life and aesthetic activity, between everyday articles and works of literature and art, there is no longer any need to draw a definite boundary, nor any need to cross a material boundary; one need only change the human's attitude, change the signifying mode of language and sign, and change the mode of connection and feeling between human and object-world, in order to realize a free conversion between the real world and the virtual world, turning everyday viewing into free artistic appreciation. This is precisely the mystery of Duchamp's creation of the "readymade" Fountain, and the mystery of performance art. At the same time, it foreshadows "the aestheticization of everyday life" and "the everydayization of the aesthetic." "That non-art things can be freely regarded by people—this is where the life of art lies." (Rancière 51)
Therefore, aesthetic ability is both an ability of partition and an ability of conversion, the joint action of the two; and only through the necessary aesthetic training does this possibility exist. In On Tragedy, Vernant cites a startling case: in the fifth century BC, a tragedy recounting the fall of Miletus was performed for the first time and unexpectedly provoked a riot. Vernant points out that it was precisely the lack of temporal distance that led to this riot: "The tragic mode is a mode of pathos; it poses the question of the human, it questions itself—rather than questioning contemporary events." (Vernant 434–435) Vernant correctly stresses the distance between artistic appreciation and reality; among the means, the simplest and most effective is to set up temporal distance, which provides the audience with a space for free imagination, forcing the audience to use its own imagination to enter the artistic world and to separate from the real world. Especially for the ancient Greeks, who had not yet made a definite partition between the aesthetic and real life, this temporal distance was all the more important, for it could avoid the riot provoked by confusing two different worlds. This ability of partition needs to be cultivated through aesthetic practice. "As a generalized capacity that suspends everyday urgencies and brackets practical ends, as a lasting practical disposition and talent without practical function, the aesthetic disposition can be formed only in an experience of the world detached from pressing need and in an activity that has its end in itself, such as schooling or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, the aesthetic disposition implies a distance from the world (the 'distance from role' proposed by Goffman is one particular dimension of this distance), and this distance is the root of the bourgeois experience of the world." (Bourdieu 89–90) Therefore, sense organs possessed of aesthetic ability can be shaped only in aesthetic practice and are inseparable from the differentiation of the signifying intention of speech.
The ability of partition in aesthetic activity is rooted in the speech-act's differentiation of the real world from the virtual world, the differentiation of the signifying mode of language; while the ability of conversion comes from the free conversion of the signifying mode of language and from changes in its two-dimensional tension-structure with behavior-language. In everyday activity, the human always initiates real behavior to cope with a concrete situation, and although this behavior is under the dual control of unconscious experience and consciousness, it is, after all, real behavior. But in the virtual reference of fictional discourse, subconscious experience revives, behavior-language memory gains full activation and, in cooperation with the speech-act, jointly constructs an imagined fictional world. From this one can see the difference between aesthetic activity and everyday activity: what everyday activity initiates is the real behavior of the real world, constrained by the purposiveness and conventionality of real activity; what aesthetic activity activates is the behavior-language memory of the fictional world, which re-presents deep unconscious experience, lets the appreciator fully experience the aesthetic situation, produces a feeling of being personally on the scene and a resonance, and comprehends a profound, pure sense of life—yet does not initiate real behavior itself. When people give up everyday purposive behavior and turn to the summoning of deep behavior-language memory, they necessarily cast off the bondage of social convention, transforming behavior into the imagined free behavior in the fictional world. This is the so-called "aesthetic inhibition" and "aesthetic freedom." Therefore, only after the signification of language has undergone clear differentiation, a boundary has been established between the fictional world (the virtual context) and the real world, and human aesthetic ability has been markedly raised, does free conversion between aesthetic activity and everyday activity become possible. From this point, the creator and the viewer of literature and art can both freely move through the two worlds of the aesthetic and the everyday without causing confusion. "Attention is not a faculty of some already-formed subject but a sign—not so much the sign of the subject's disappearance as the sign of the subject's instability, contingency, and non-substantiality." (Crary 35) In literary-artistic activity, the "community of interpretation" is in essence embodied in the artistic sign, which simultaneously contains two oppositely coexisting elements—behavior-language and the speech-act and their conventions; they are the common measure by which humanity senses and feels the world, prescribing the mode and order of sensation and feeling. It is precisely the shareability of sign and convention that provides the basis for the "community of interpretation."
Therefore, at the time when linguistic signification has not yet undergone clear differentiation, when no boundary has yet formed between the fictional world and the real world, and when aesthetic education is not yet widespread, artificially setting up a boundary between art and non-art is a necessary condition for the appreciation of literature and art. Drama in particular often needs the "fourth wall" to help create partition, because drama directly takes the human body as a performing sign and is therefore more easily confused with the real situation. As the audience's aesthetic ability rises, directors can continually attempt to tear down this wall.
IV. The Self-Reference of Language and Sign, and Sensory Configuration and Its Reconstruction
The relative independence that language possesses gives it the capacity for objectification, which can set up not only the world as object but also language itself as object, devoting itself to drawing the human's attention to language itself and letting language radiate vitality anew. At this point, the object that language refers to is no longer the world outside language; this is the self-reference of language, even reference to language's form, to the way language's organization is structured. As Mukařovský says of poetic language, this is "foregrounding": "In poetic language, foregrounding attains the maximum intensity such that the communication that is the aim of conveyance is pushed into the background, while foregrounding seems to take itself as its aim; it does not serve conveyance but serves to place expression and the linguistic act itself in the foreground." (Mukařovský 19) In literary-artistic activity, when language and sign themselves become the focus of attention, the content that literature and art convey no longer carries weight; what occupies the foreground is the form of literature and art, its mode of symbolic structuring or law of organization—that is, convention—and literature and art thereby become "pure poetry," become "pure form."
In ancient China, whether poetry as a constituent part of ritual, or the poetic chronicle that perceived the mores and feelings of the people, or the poetic teaching that cultivated character, the content it signified had an extraordinary importance, while the tonal-prosodic form was not the focus of attention. Therefore Shen Yue explains: "Such marvels, yet the sages did not esteem them—why? This is because the cleverness of intricate tones and rhymes has no bearing on instruction and meaning and is not what the sages and worthies were urgent about in establishing their words. Thus Ziyun [Yang Xiong] likened it to 'carving insects and engraving seals' and said 'a real man does not do it.'" (Shen Yue 137)
On one hand, from the Wei and Jin onward, power changed hands frequently, the sole-revered status of Confucianism was shaken, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism coexisted, and the fashion for "pure conversation" and landscape poetry prevailed—all of which displayed the literati's psychological state of fleeing real society; this at the same time made poets gradually weary of caring for reality and turn, in an attitude of connoisseurship, to vie over poetic form, especially the beauty of tone and rhyme. On the other hand, in the state of poetry-music unity, the musicality that poetic language itself possessed was often submerged in the musical sound and did not display its own independent value; although in actual composition the tones and rhymes of language were always widely employed, this was not something the author deliberately undertook. And when poetry gradually separated from music and became mere poetry, then, for the sake of smooth and beautiful recitation, the value of language's own musicality was highlighted. The reference of poetic language turned from the signified to the signifier itself, and the prosody of the linguistic signifier began to become the focus of the poet's scrutiny and the target of his deliberate ornamentation. And so the imitated chanting-translation sounds of the Buddhist sutras precisely provided poetic language with inspiration and reference.
Zhen Chen once criticized Shen Yue for "not relying on the ancient classics but arbitrarily making far-fetched constructions." Shen Yue replied: "In the classics and histories there are only the five tones [of music], not the four tones [of speech]. Yet how does the use of the four tones harm the five tones? The five tones—gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu—when high and low respond to one another, then the musical sound is harmonious; ruler, minister, people, affairs, and things—when these five accord, then the state is well ordered. He who writes five-character poetry, if he uses the four tones well, then the recitation flows smoothly; if he can master the eight forms, then it is resplendent and pure. Clearly each has its own application, and they do not hinder or supplant each other." (Shen Yue 468–469) This rebuttal clearly displays that, in the course of poetry's gradual separation from music, the two different prosodic requirements of poetry and music were still confused at that time. Zhen Chen's "not relying on the ancient classics" stresses the five musical tones—gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu—while the four tones Shen Yue proposed clearly refer to the level, rising, departing, and entering tones of language. The former refers to the musical scale, the latter to the pitch-values of words. Shen Yue understood this distinction, and so he said "each has its own application, and they do not hinder or supplant each other." Because literati often borrowed musical terms to figure the tones and rhymes of language, this misunderstanding was perpetuated.
The self-reference of language highlighted the importance of the tones and rhymes of poetic language and shaped sensibility's keenness toward form. In "A Discourse on the Biography of Xie Lingyun," Shen Yue proposed: "Now, the five colors set each other off and the eight tones harmonize, by virtue of the dark-and-yellow and the pitch-pipes, each suited to what is fitting. One should make gong and yu alternate, high and low vary in measure: if there is a 'floating sound' before, then there must be a 'clipped resonance' after. Within a single strip, the sounds and rhymes are all distinct; within two lines, the light and the heavy are all different. Only one who marvelously masters this principle can begin to speak of literary composition." (Shen Yue 484) This practice of over-stressing the tones and rhymes of language, though a self-awareness of literary language, could not but fall into the quagmire of formalism.
Rancière made a further exposition of Hegel's discussion of "the relation of the ideal to nature." He points out that, in the process of art's turning to the non-utilitarian, the change of artistic subject-matter played an important transitional role. The subject-matter of the Flemish and Dutch schools was no longer grand events and noble persons but turned to everyday life and ordinary people. Once any phenomenon could enter the subject-matter of a work, the importance of subject-matter was lost. And so painting no longer contained some profound allegory, no longer extolled some majestic figure, no longer was a moral demonstration and admonition; the work seemed able only to display the modeling and brilliance of the picture, the drawing of lines and the application of color, only to offer people a surface play to appreciate and a pure pleasure to enjoy, and therefore tended toward "irrelevance to use," tended toward "autonomy." If the virtual signification of language and sign fundamentally provided the possibility-condition for the independence of literature and art, then the turn of the signified of language and sign from noble, majestic subject-matter to everyday, ordinary subject-matter played precisely a transitional role. The debasement of the meaning of a work's subject-matter naturally caused it to lose its own degree of attention; its bond connecting it with reality slackened, and the work gradually moved toward "autonomy." When the signified content of language and sign was no longer important and the marriage of the signified to reality was dissolved, a signifier detached from the real context occupied the foreground position, and the non-real virtual signification thereby took the chance to stand out; this brought greater spiritual freedom to literary-artistic activity and also made attention shift. The trajectory of change from epic to novel, then to avant-garde fiction and postmodern metafiction, likewise displays this long process of transformation.
Western modernist literature and art evolved precisely in this direction of self-reference, thereby causing the human's attention to shift from the content the work describes to form, causing the reconfiguration and reconstruction of sensation. This attention to the literary-artistic sign itself strengthened the importance of artistic form and its texture. "It is precisely this texture that lets a form, a stroke of color, a passage of passion, a blank space, a movement, a glint on a flat plane, bring people emotion, make it an event, and only then connect to the idea of artistic creation." (Rancière 2) This turn made literature and art detach from the life-experience of the ordinary masses, detach from everyday behavior-language memory, detach from the everyday feelings and emotions familiar to them, and become the patent of those experts proficient in the artistic sign, become the "narcissistic" self-appreciation within the small circle of writers and artists. All who had not undergone special training and lacked familiarity with and understanding of the artistic sign and its conventions were shut out at the gate of the palace of literature and art and lost the qualification to appreciate literature and art.
In The Dehumanization of Art, Gasset points out that, for most people, aesthetic enjoyment has no essential difference from the ordinary likes and dislikes of everyday life. When people take an interest in the fate of the characters in a drama, they come to like the work. The loves and hates of the characters move the spectators' minds, and they share the characters' sorrows and joys. In poetry, the reader is interested in the poet's inner life. In painting, people look for the figures and scenes familiar to them. Gasset holds that none of these is aesthetic feeling. True aesthetic feeling exists in the new art, which tends toward "pure art." "In this process, there always comes a moment, at last, when the humanized element in the work is reduced to where it can scarcely be discerned; and such a work can be understood only by people who have that special artistic sense. This art belongs only to artists, not to the popular masses; it will be a minority art and is not popular… The new art is artistic art." (Gasset 10–11) Gasset's "new art" empties out the everyday content that art means to narrate and, through formal innovation, forces the appreciator's attention to turn to the formal factors of art, and the signifying intention of the sign to turn to the sign-form itself. These works, which lose signified content and erase characters, no longer arouse the emotions familiar to people, no longer possess familiar humanity. But this does not mean that art thereby becomes pure artistic form; it is precisely because it has transcended the everyday life-context that it can more deeply arouse behavior-language memory and release unconscious experience. Only that this experience is not the experience the individual acquires in everyday life, not that shallow-level unconscious experience, but a deeper-level unconscious experience. Because this deep-level unconscious experience comes from the organism and is of long historical duration, it already appears, for humanity, vague in meaning and impossible to explain; detached from familiar everyday life and concrete images, it retains only the biological, physiological reactions of the living body to light, line, color, sound, movement, rhythm, and formal texture, and these reactions have already been "dehumanized."
From Gasset's angle, music is the art-category that was first "dehumanized." Especially in absolute music, the signified content of the sign is thoroughly diluted, the meaning already blurred, leaving only the sign-form of musical sound, only phoneme, sonority, rhythm, melody, and harmony—becoming the paradigm of art's "dehumanization." Modern abstract painting then follows music in seeking its own independence, dissolving its marriage with the real image and concentrating on the painting-sign itself. The "grids" they are keen on display the artistic claim of anti-nature, anti-imitation, and anti-reality, causing the signified meaning of the sign to be devalued and thereby forcing attention to turn to the signifier itself, stressing the independence of the sign's signifier. Behind abstract painting, the speech-act plays a special role: it both forcefully compels the signifying intention to turn to the signifier itself and weakens and blurs the conceptual meaning of the painting-sign. Once painting turns to symbolic structure, Cubism goes further in regarding the object as detachable structural parts that can be reassembled and reconstructed, breaking visual habit and rational notion, and wantonly piecing together the different facets of the object on one and the same plane. "Cubist collage replaces the visual world of natural things with an artificial, codified grammar of signs." (Krauss 25) The bodily movement of dance, too, gradually casts off the goals of depicting life, narrating plot, shaping characters, and expressing emotion, and turns to exploring the possibilities of bodily movement itself, continually challenging the limits of movement and displaying the manifold forms of force. As Rancière says: in this dance, the body abstracts away the flesh, dissolves into form, and is transformed into a circling of force. It depicts flight without drawing a bird, depicts a whirlpool without drawing a wave, describes blossoming without drawing a flower. "This new art is the art of the new body; it removes the burden of the flesh, simplifies to a play of line and tone, and circles in the air." (Rancière 109) All of this prompts the shift of the human's attention—especially the shift of unconscious experience from the individual to deep-level originary experience—causing a re-excavation of the sensuous and constructing a brand-new mode of viewing.
By comparison, literature treads with difficulty. Language can hardly wash off signified content; even when the signifier-form is pushed into the foreground, it cannot thoroughly clear away conceptual meaning, can hardly erase the person, thing, or event that the linguistic signified states, can hardly thoroughly dehumanize. Valéry deeply felt this difficulty. On one hand, he advocated "pure poetry," devoting himself to remolding language as a "practical instrument" and endowing it with a fictional ideal order, regarding music's "pure phonemes" and "pure combinations" as the goal of poetry; on the other, he knew clearly that language itself is a multicolored "hodgepodge" and could only regard "pure poetry" as a tendency of effort and a realm of hope, an inconceivable exemplary idea. Eliot too likened the "meaning" of language to the "piece of meat" that a "burglar" prepares for the "watchdog"—a means the poet can discard at any time to achieve his creative end. Differing from this, Warren explicitly criticized the "theory of pure poetry," pointing out: "That effort which attempts to exclude concepts from poetry destroys the unity of our being and the unity of our experience." (Warren 202–203) Nonetheless, literature still resolutely merged into this general tendency that gives weight to form; linguistic tension, symbol, metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, irony… all mounted the front of the stage to much attention, and cultivated the appreciator's habit of "close reading."
This new art movement is "first of all an art that makes no distinction among the various arts—one might say, an art that fuses them. Yet this art does not combine the resources of poetry, symphony, plastic art, and choreography. This art can present a 'homogeneous and complete place,' rather, precisely because it denies the so-called particular characteristics of material and technique, because what it presents is the unfolding of force and form prior to these characteristics: before dance, there is first movement; before painting, there are first gesture and light; before poetry, there are first the traces of the various signs and forms—that is, the gesture of the world, the composition of the world" (Rancière 120). In the final analysis, the various different artistic signs have a common source: behavior-modeling. It is precisely the deep-level unconscious experience, that common sedimentation of the living body's behavior, that makes the different art types tend toward one and the same direction: a pure force that displays the form of life. In fact, at the very moment when the artistic sign refers to the sign itself, it has already sent an ardent summons to the deepest behavior-language memory. This is precisely the root of Eliot's advocacy of "impersonality" and Gasset's pointing out of "dehumanization."
When the artistic sign itself occupies the foreground position, the artist is no longer intoxicated with expressing real life but is keen on experimenting with artistic form itself, keen on toying with the artistic sign; sign-reference is no longer the real image but the artistic sign itself. And so symbolic convention becomes the object that the artist consciously violates, challenges, and innovates. To tamper with and abolish the established convention with vaulting ambition, to seek the legitimacy of establishing a new convention, to carry out formal innovation continually, and to challenge the human's sensation and feeling—these become the very historical mission of literature and art. Ideology too seizes the chance to smuggle in its private goods by way of changing convention.
Only experts who have undergone special training and are familiar with artistic-sign conventions can concentrate on the artistic sign itself, carefully ponder the relation of a particular artwork to symbolic convention, and experience the flavor of the artistic sign. As Bourdieu says: a work of art has meaning and arouses interest only for one who possesses the cultural competence to decode it. "This competence is often the product of unintentional training; a disposition acquired through the family or the school's acquisition of legitimate culture makes this unintentional training possible. This transposable disposition is equipped with a whole set of universally applicable modes of cognition and evaluation; it inclines toward other cultural experiences and allows these experiences to be cognized, divided, and recorded in other ways." (Bourdieu 40–41) The "whole set of universally applicable modes of cognition and evaluation" of which Bourdieu speaks is the fruit of artistic training, and in it symbolic convention plays the core role. Convention is the "compact" formed through negotiation within the art circle; the universal modes of cognition and evaluation are established precisely in adapting to artistic-sign convention. The stability of symbolic convention guarantees the universal validity of the modes of cognition and evaluation; the transformation of convention leads to the evolution of artistic styles and schools and the renewal of artistic modes of cognition and evaluation.
The reading of traditional works of art naturally cannot, either, detach from an understanding of the artistic sign and its conventions. Art "has its own 'language'; people need to make an effort to understand the implicit complex intentions, conventions, styles, and techniques in order to truly understand it" (Haskell 10). Even so, in traditional painting, sign-knowledge was not decisive for its influence on the appreciator; the focus the work expressed was still everyday emotion and everyday experience familiar to people, and so the reading of the work presented no insurmountable difficulty. But with the transformation of modern art, the artistic sign and its conventions have occupied the foreground position, art itself has become the core of appreciation and evaluation, and convention too has undergone an important change; if one lacks a mastery of the sign and its conventions, one completely loses the possibility of artistic appreciation and evaluation.
When the self-reference of language and sign increasingly highlights symbolic convention, when the transformation of symbolic convention involves not merely the innovation and evolution of artistic styles and schools but points directly to artistic concepts and artistic institutions, raises sharp questions about artistic concepts and institutions, and even makes a reinterpretation of the "definition" of art, "meta-art" is born. The artist more boldly subverts traditional art, breaks the boundary between art and non-art, and launches an assault on artistic concepts and institutions. Conceptual innovation becomes the artist's obsession. Duchamp's Fountain, Man Ray's Gift, Magritte's The Treachery of Images ("This is not a pipe"), Warhol's Brillo Boxes, Rauschenberg's Soundings, Morris's Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, and the various kinds of performance art all intend to shake, deconstruct, and even discard the basic belief "what is art," causing an enormous impact on artistic concepts and institutions. Yet, whether the change of concept or of institution, it is mainly the fruit of speech-act construction, and this turn fully displays the strong position of the speech-act in artistic activity.
"Art adopts all sorts of disguises by any means in order to avoid seeming to be art" (Levin 152). As for Fountain, what Duchamp gave weight to was no longer the "grammar" of the artistic sign itself but the "context"; he turned from the "grammar" of the sign to "pragmatics," (3) using the readymade Fountain to complete a "declarative act," with which to proclaim: tear down the existing barrier between art and non-art, let the readymade become a new artwork, and let anything become an artwork without being changed, thereby reaching a new contract with the art world and even the public. Duchamp treated artistic convention with a selective attitude; he used the institutional convention external to art (that is, the space of the exhibition hall) to abolish the convention of the artistic sign itself, thereby highlighting the institutional convention that had originally been hidden in the shadow of artistic-sign convention, causing a change in artistic concept and perceptual configuration, and finally making Fountain a landmark event of twentieth-century new art.
In the literary domain, metafiction and historiographic metafiction became the fashion. Coetzee's novel Foe takes the writing-process of Robinson Crusoe as its object of reflection, revealing the colonialist ideological tendency hidden in the narrative discourse. Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot seizes on a detail to subvert the historical narrative of Flaubert's biography and re-examine the relation between historical narrative and reality: is it that historical narrative describes reality, or that reality imitates historical narrative? The attention of writer and reader is reconfigured, and "narrative discourse" moves from the hidden to the front of the stage, becoming the focus from which New Historicism, neo-colonialism, feminism, and cultural criticism excavate the various hidden powers.
When what the sign refers to is artistic concept and artistic institution, art returns to the concept itself; art becomes a "theory" about art, becomes a conceptualized philosophy, becomes a thing continually attacked and deconstructed by art itself. Innovation becomes the unceasing opposition to all innovative notions. The physical boundary between art and non-art is torn down, the armor of art's self-protection is ripped apart, and the solid surrounding wall collapses. "The artist is no longer a creator; he becomes a critic, a commentator, and an absent performer—just like a puppet controlled by invisible forces." (Levin 160) Of this artistic condition, Danto made this summary: "What we see is something that depends more and more on theory in order to exist as art"; these works display another characteristic, "namely that the object approaches zero while its theory approaches infinity, so that everything is in fact ultimately only theory, and art finally evaporates in the dazzling light of pure thought about itself, and what remains seems to be only something that serves as the object of its own theoretical consciousness" (Danto 101–102). Art itself becomes theory, becomes reflection, deliberation, and debate upon artistic concept and institution, becomes what Hegel calls the ultimate stage of spirit's development: "philosophy." The speech-act, hidden in the shadow of the artistic sign, urgently wishes to appear directly and to proclaim its own view with extraordinary boldness and unbridled momentum. Therefore Danto, imitating Hegel's formulation, calls this condition of art "the end of art."