Motivation and Emotion, VoL 4, No. 2, 1980

Structuralism and Experimental Aesthetics: Bridging Some Gaps 1

John M. Kennedy 2 Searborough College, University of Toronto

Structuralism in psychology has much to do with what Berlyne called his rival tradition in aesthetics, the speculative and interpretative approach. Berlyne's concern with motivation can be retained while structuralism's emphasis on understanding is accepted.

My aim in this paper is to address Dan Berlyne's central concern, the nature of the motivations engaged by the arts. I hope to describe the kind o f motivations to which Berlyne directed his work, and in contrast the kind of motivat ion that often interests Berlyne's critics. I want to begin to build a bridge between the enterprise called experimental aesthetics and the concerns o f its critics. Bridge-building begins with foundations, and some of the foundations I will consider are the roles o f analysis and experiments, what can and cannot be observed, motivation, the meaning of words like spirit and soul in phrases like " the arts reveal the human spir i t ," and problems of reductionism and comprehension in aesthetics.

Berlyne was crystal-clear about his rivals. His last article in Leonardo (Berlyne, 1977) surveyed his own work and its competitors with a bright dis- passionate eye. He saw that there is a major alternative to his work in a coherent tradition of interpretation, speculation, and appreciat ion that often at tempts to enable one to enjoy more, appreciate more, and be enlightened by more in a work of art. F rom Cicero to Malraux, it is said that art pleases, moves, and informs us. We can see this tradition alive and

'This paper was originally presented at the Berlyne Symposium, American Psychological As- sociation Meeting, San Francisco, August 1977. Support from the Connaught Development Grant to Scarborough College is acknowledged.

2Address all correspondence to Dr. John M. Kennedy, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, West Hills, Ontario, MIC IA4, Canada.

123 0146-7239/80/0600-0123503.00/0 © 1980 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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working in recent writings by Danto, Sparshott, and Arnheim, for example. This tradition at its most adamant plainly tells the novice how he ought to approach works of art.

In the above-mentioned paper, Berlyne openly admitted that his work leaves his rivals "not infrequently horrified." Even when they understand empirical aesthetics properly, they simply see it "examining the verbal and other reactions of ordinary people with no special training, interests or aptitudes in the arts. It asks some not very penetrating questions. It exposes them very briefly to works of art or other stimulus patterns that they have not encountered before and therefore never had any chance to study. Surely, all that [can be obtained] from data of this kind is a mass expression of ignorance."

Berlyne believed that "the stimulus properties that seem to play a dominant role in aesthetic appreciation--the properties for which [he has] coined the term "collative properties"--have widespread motivational effects that seem to demand scrutiny." His plan was to be a kind of Tycho Brahe before being a Kepler; that is, he proposed to gather information before attempting to propose underlying mathematical designs; only finally would he try to be a Newton, that is, to propose laws. I recall his comparing the systematic work of data-gathering by Francis Hare, one of his students in music, to Mendel patiently listing and summarizing his findings with plants.

Berlyne therefore laid great stress on being properly scientific in method and discussion, on combining mathematics and empirical observa- tion, on making verifiable claims. Quite justly he was suspicious of untestable assertions. Experimental studies were necessary as the search for causal order must be conducted with "observables," and he was a kind of naturalist in having, as Fisher (1977) put it, "a set of philosophical presup- positions which collectively deny that there can be any entities or events beyond the range of scientific explanation." Anything beyond that range may be deemed to be nonexistent. Berlyne's work, in method and aims, lies in the centre of standard experimental psychology, in which the question is asked, "What will we find if we apply the approach of the successful natural sciences to the study of man?" (He describes what he takes to be the approach of the successful natural sciences in the Leonardo article.)

At present, psychology is in the midst of a striking change, in which the old methods and canons of discussion are being eroded. We are no longer so sure what is observable. Also, a tidal current of something called structuralism is washing through the old defenses against poor methods and rubbishy concepts.

As Berlyne (1975) noted, there has not been a solid paradigm for all of psychology, no monolithic body of universally accepted beliefs, methods, and recognized phenomena. But there has been, surely, an aim offered by

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Wundt and now taken largely for granted, namely, that the experimental method is the royal route to established fact. However, the single-minded belief that only the experimental method yields facts is now suspect.

We are no longer so clearly four-square against analytic interpretation as a source of facts and " d a t a , " and no longer so sure that it is easy to call something an "en t i ty" beyond the range of science. As Caws (1968) put it, structuralism's very considerable problem for science (and I would add psychology in particular) is that it can reintroduce "once again for intellect a territory we had all but abandoned to the absurd." When Ames (1975) says that structuralism basically tries to make what we study "intelligible" by simply defining the key elements, and the rules joining the elements, it is easy to see how much affinity there is between structuralism and the tradition of interpretation enjoyed by Berlyne's rivals in aesthetics.

The key problem for standard psychology and its defenses against nonscientific concepts is that, while structuralists sometimes are willing to reduce their elements to mass, length, and time coordinates, they rarely need to do the same for the rules joining the elements. While the king on a given chessboard is a particular object at a particular place at a particular time with a particular weight, none of these properties defines it as a king. Rather, it is its relationship to the other pieces that makes it a king. Piaget tries to reduce relations (and operations) to actions, which means he can deal with a chess king. But often it is just not possible to reduce relations (and operations) to actions.

Berlyne (1975)clearly points out that it is silly to attack behaviorism by saying behavior is "only the outward manifestation of what really counts ." Behavior is important in its own right, Berlyne concludes, to the discomfiture of looser-minded extremists among the structuralists or indeed the humanists: Mass killing is dreadful no matter what it is " a

manifestation o f . " But actually, the key epistemological issue is not "Which is important, experience or behavior?" Rather, the issue is " Is it possible or impossible to reduce a mental event, exhaustively, to behavioral events?" The answer is that while behavior can at times be evidence for mental events, it is n o t an exhaustive reflection of a mental event.

Consider these claims in the form of particular examples. It is not the sounds that come from a speaker at a particular place and

time that define him as having language--he might be just a parrot. Rather, his understanding of and competence with the relationships between the elements is the key. It is not the shape of the responses emerging from a person that define him as social--he might be an automaton--but rather his understanding of his relationship to other people.

These understandings and, in general, the capacities to be aware of re- lationships are not reducible to a f i n i t e se t of physical bits of evidence, the structuralists note. Let me explain.

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Say, for example, I have a belief, perhaps the belief that art is ex- pressing things. For you to get evidence about my belief, you could proceed to gather an unlimited number of bits of evidence. You could simply ask me whether I thought art expressed things, and you could ask me to respond in English, French, Japanese, etc. You could teach me what "Yes" was in any language, or invent new ways for me to say yes or for me to indicate assent, by nodding, raising my eyebrows, or whatever. In principle, there is no limit to the physical events you could coax me into offering as assent, and then take as evidence for a belief.

Hence, in general, the evidence for a mental state--like belief--is potentially infinite, and not reducible.

Berlyne (1975) noted that mental events must not be left wrapped in impenetrable mystery, that we can view them as "der ivat ions" of overt acts. To that must be added: Overt acts can be evidence for mental states, but it is the mental event that is only partly indicated by the overt act, and not the other way around.

Once structuralism accepts that while some elements may entail finite mass, length, and time properties, at least some relations are not reducible to finite sets of evidence, some of the old floodgates defending scientific psychology against mysterious concepts are torn asunder.

New floodgates are necessary, but that is another story. At the moment, all I will try to do is rescue some of the good in empirical aesthetics, while returning some old but somewhat neglected concepts to their company.

I'll make a point each about methods, terms, and motivation. So let us turn to "methods for obtaining facts ."

Structuralism leads us to accept as a suitable method any attempt to make things intelligible. (Notice that this is very different from the ideo- graphic attempt to enable us to get at "knowing what it is like t o " ) (Kennedy, 1978). It is no longer possible to divide the study of the arts neatly into speculative analysis on the one hand and fact-gathering statistical response-counting on the other. Any attempt to examine the elements is relevant. Indeed, the emphasis shifts to the person's under- standing of the nature of the elements and their relations. In literature, for example, the stimulus (to continue to use that term for a moment) is the wording, and the relations become every possible grammatical relation, every kind of figure of speech (metaphor, simile, understatement, hyperbole, etc.), all types of dramatic inflection, every kind of joke, im- plication, and clarification. The point of analysis becomes to determine the range of possibilities and their possible uses--all of which are matters of fact. The argument is that language is a tool for the mind, and the structuralist's business is to determine what kind of a tool it is in fact that it can contribute to civilization, to knowing and communicating. A

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structuralist would accept that some kinds of language are "preferred," in the terms of experimental aesthetics. A structuralist would expect, for example, that preferences reflect comprehension, and follow from a good fit between meaning and the medium.

Notice that 9 times out of 10, the analysis of the kinds of relationships in the language will proceed without the usual kinds of experiments. To define or invent relationships for language is a matter of empirical examination, not "experiment." Empirical studies of the old sort enter when we have questions about who uses special devices in language, or how to encourage comprehension and use. In sum, the possibilities of language are a matter for empirical analysis and invention, and the nature of language in large measure is not a subject for experiment.

Similarly, a psychology of the arts, dealing for example with relations between works of art, must recognize what the relations are between individual works--how one work refers to the other, for instance, Berlyne's term for factors like these was collative variability--how a particular item entails comparisons with others so that it is more complex or surprising. (The significance of measuring responses like looking-time or memorability or choice, which are often conceived to be related to collafive variability, wilt be considered in a moment.) A structuralist agrees that how we think one work is related to another is important, but this is not just a matter of measurable degrees of difference but of type or kind of difference. Is the work a satire, a rejection, an improvement, a solution, a joke, an allusion, an acknowledgment, a comparison, homage, an illustration, or what? Notice that all these terms refer to matters of understanding, and no matter whether there was full agreement between two people on preference be- tween items in a set of works, if one understands the works and the other does not, we would consider them poles apart; one has missed the point, is muddled.

Once again, these questions about the work are not a matter for experimentation of the usual type but rather one of definition, of examination for relevant characteristics. The adjoining experimental ques- tions are ones like "Who understands these types of works?" and "Where does the understanding originate?"

Berlyne (1975) says that scientific psychologists have had three distinct subject matters--conscious experiences, behavior, and mental events/ process. This may be misleading. What the structuralist returns to psychology is attention to the tools, products, and artifacts of man. The relationships between parts of language, the way one work follows another, and the kinds of rules describing types of works (like epigrams, sonnets, stories, myths) are all a subject matter that reveals the nature of man and his capacities. Without ever seeing a person, an interplanetary archaeologist could use our products, especially our art works, to define

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man. He need not study " a conscious experience of man ' s , " nor need he have any behavior to study or any mental process to manipulate. To understand man we could and should begin with the great tools that ensure civilization--art, mathematics, philosophy, and science. To understand these is to understand man. These should be the magnets for our interest, and each can only be studied by examining how to understand examples o f each. What can a work of art be, that a person can comprehend it? What can a person be, that he can comprehend a work of art? The two questions lean on each other- - jus t as the psychology of mathematics rests on our understanding of what mathematics is.

Now let us turn to "legitimate terms for science." In the past it was comparatively easy to relegate some concepts to the waste heap of un- scientific matters. Anything that was observable was allowed entry to discussion. In contrast, as Ames (1975) notes, structuralists blithely use things rather like the forms of Plato, things like syntactic and semantic forms.

Some time back, psychology excommunicated the soul, became dispirited and lost its mind. Notice, however, that from a structuralist's standpoint the attack on the mind as "no t a scientific term, because it does not refer to a physical ent i ty" emerges as simply a misguided "category er ror ." To twist some of Ryle's words (and make exactly the reciprocal point to Ryle!), not believing in the mind is like not believing in the university just because we had only seen some buildings and people. In fine, what can be apprehended is a matter of considerable flexibility, given that we can perceive relations, that we have different purposes guiding our attention, and that there are few obvious boundaries on the possible complexities o f the perceivable world, a fact that has great importance for aesthetics.

Today it is widely accepted that mind is a useful term for psychology--and to that extent psychology makes a healthy contact with the rest of scholarship, which was for some time aghast at our adolescent rebellious excesses. Mind, of course, refers to a class of capacities and activities, including those nonreducible states we call beliefs. To have a mind is to have the capacity for knowing.

What of soul and spirit? These terms abound in comments on the arts, and we cannot ignore them any more than a psychologist can ignore " m i n d . "

Since many people speak of a work of art as spirited, and of a novelist as laying before us the human soul, we must face the puzzle of what to do with these things, and at the same time allow for the argument that they are not independent material entities. And of course the answer is that our spirit entails moods and passions like being cheery, serene, and depressed. One's soul is more profound, for it involves character and mora l i t ynone ' s

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soul is tortured, courageous, noble, gentle, and considerate, flee, proud, or vain. In other words, the terms refer to observable characteristics of people, important attitudes and dispositions that can be revealed as invariants in reactions to our situations. These are the kinds of characteristics of spirit and soul that Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Conrad described and it is foolish to dispute them on the grounds that they are speaking o f imaginary ghosts. They describe what we can see if we look around, and their use of language is consistent, as welt as entrenched in Western society. A psychology of the arts must approach these concepts or miss the raison d 'etre of almost any great work of art.

As I will point our shortly, if we concede that mind, spirit, and soul can be apprehended through art, and art often aims at that apprehension, then the questions we should raise about motivations become clear.

Now, with regard to motivation. While the "s t imulus" properties o f course play a dominant role in aesthetic appreciation, more must be said. We must realize that once we admit structuralist emphases, old distinctions between comprehension and motivation become tenuous at best, and misleading at worst. The significant thing is that works of art seem important or banal, not simply curious or surprising, and we cannot reduce importance to surprisingness. We can be fascinated and surprised that a great artist has produced a banal piece of work, and we could spend ages trying to find out why it is banal, and the end result can be that it still seems banal. There is no strong link between the length of time we spend poring over a piece of artwork, and its surprisingness, and our reaction that it is shoddy.

Rather, motivation is important when it involves taking a piece of work as entailing profound relationships--as being full of spirit and as re- flecting the most central aspects of the human soul. When an artwork engenders some of this kind of reaction, then it is indeed worthy of attention. Notice that we cannot reduce importance to "operational" measures like memorability or attention-grabbingness. The work may be disturbing, and we may even suppress it in memory. It may be too much for us, and we may avoid it and so spend little time with it. We may even find we prefer other pieces, because it confronts us too strongly. So there is no straightforward link between its profundity and operational measures like memorability, time spent examining it, and preference. But the work is important. It may comment on love and hate, identity and meaninglessness, honor and ignominy. And it is how we understand it and the significance o f the ideas and skills it embodies that largely underlies what we broadly call its motivating effects.

Berlyne was right in many things. To approach art while neglecting motivation is to lose sight o f art as a driving force. He was right: psychology must spend its time exploring the seemingly impractical, seemingly

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unbiotogical motivations--that these kinds of motives pervade society. He was right too that art relies on the kind of references between works that he called "cotlative variability." Structuralism adds to his work rather than detracting from it. What structuralism provides is methods that enable a bridge to be built from orthodox psychology to the rivals of empirical aesthetics. It enables the hardheaded to begin to respect the kinds of ideas the tradition of analysis and interpretation find useful. Neither school is entirely eroded by structuralism; they both enjoy a sea change, shifting priorities, detecting new currents of ideas.

In broad terms, consider what underlies much modern art. Art in general is a reaction to previous art as well as to nature. At times, art tries to give us views of humanity independent of art--reflecting Guernica, for example. But at times, too, the major thrust involves a "commentary" on art itself. Paintings of soup cans, objects that decay and cannot be stored, art that cannot be paid for and collected, art that can never be seen, theater that takes place in the world and not in performing places--all of these call the conduct of art into question. The form is understanding per se, understanding art itself. Surprise, novelty, challenge--these are the emphases. If repetition is not prized, it is fair game for conceptual art. If complexity is prized, uniformity can be an interesting attack.

Berlyne was right about cotlative variability, in that great art differs from its predecessors and that this matters. In much of modern art, Berlyne's coUative variability is taken to include the rules of art itself. But of course, it is not simply the surprise element that matters--it is how the difference is understood that matters. It is when we combine Berlyne's emphasis on comparisons with the structuralist attempt to distinguish the relevant differences and relationships that we can recognize what kind of understanding is entailed, and whether we will accept that the motive--to return to Berlyne's key term--has some momentum in human affairs.

Art is important because it is motivated by major human concerns, including the motives to understand life and to comment on art itself, afresh and anew, in the terms and spirit of the day. It is motivating because it is a mirror of fundamental human motives, and it brings revised views of significant human aims to mind. It addresses our understanding and moves us by confronting us with aspects of the human mind, spirit, and soul. We need to adopt the procedures of structuralism in discussing art, and to hold firm to Berlyne's belief that art has motivating powers, while we make a science of studying people's connections to art--understanding art and people with all the scrupulous care Berlyne showed in his demands for authentic methods.

Cicero told us that art pleases, moves, and informs us. Berlyne kept bringing the pleasing and moving nature of art to our attention. Perhaps a structuratist's phrases, retaining Berlyne's emphases, could be that (1) art

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pleases, moves, and informs us; (2) art informs us about what pleases and moves us; (3) art pleases us because it informs us and moves us; (4) art moves us because it informs us and pleases us.

In other words, Cicero's three functions of art are interconnected, and to study how we are motivated by a work of art we have to study how profoundly it informs us and how much it is significant for our beliefs and ways of understanding.

REFERENCES

Ames, S. S. Structuralism, language and literature. Journal o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1975, 33, 89-94.

Berlyne, D. E. Behaviorism? Humanistic psychology--To Hull with them all! Canadian Psychological Review, 1975, 16, 69-80.

Berlyne, D. E. Psychological aesthetics, speculative and scientific, Leonardo, 1977, 10, 56-58. Caws, P. Structuralism. Partisan Review, 1968, 35, 89-91. Fischer, J. Editorial. Journal o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1977, 35, 261-263. Kennedy, J. M. Identification and different arts media. In S. Madeja 0Ed.), Education and the

Arts. St. Louis: Cemrel, 1978.