Interpretation

“Language, thought and history matter with respect to reality (who would ever deny it?), so they are constitutive of reality (which is simply absurd).”1

When I was a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, there was one word I kept hearing: “subtext.” “Subtext” refers to the content the viewer is supposed to grasp implicitly. In an art shaped by this mindset, it isn’t enough for an object or an image simply to exist on its own. It is expected to carry particular messages, references, or connotations. The more indirectly and circuitously the artist expresses those messages, the wider the field of interpretation opened up for the viewer. The value of the work is directly tied to the variety and depth of the interpretations it attracts. When this is the default, objects come to be understood as passive entities, as vehicles the artist has organized in order to deliver a given message. And when they meet the viewer, they remain under the rule of meaning, flanked by discourses in various formats such as accompanying texts. What is taken as essential is their submission to the artist’s or the viewer’s processes of interpretation and meaning-making, rather than any autonomy they might carry on their own.

“Artists have an ‘interest’ in this or that; the artwork or exhibition ‘explores,’ ‘plays with,’ ‘interrogates,’ or ‘shows a sensitivity about’ such and such topic.”2

In her well-known essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag observed that modern criticism treats art through “aggressive and impious theories of interpretation.”3 An important reason for this heavy emphasis on interpretation is the denigration of the visible world. Western philosophy, from Plato onward, has been dominated by the view that the visible is the “veil” of a deeper truth, or its surface reflection. Acts of interpretation are attempts to circle (never directly) around the truth lying “behind, beneath, or above” the visible.

Another reason interpretation carries such weight is the thought that truth is relative. Hermeneutics, with roots in biblical exegesis, places interpretation at the center of understanding texts and, more broadly, of human experience. Thinkers in this field hold that every form of understanding is shaped by cultural and historical prejudices. There is no objective reality, only ever an “interpreted world” situated within a particular context.4

Another branch of interpretation, influential for art, has drawn on post-structuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. Post-structuralism and its adjacent currents pushed back against fixed meanings and stable structures, arguing that meaning is always deferred and dispersed across a network of relations. There is no access to a reality outside language and discourse; everything is, in effect, text, interpretation, and power relations.5

Psychoanalysis has also played an important role in placing interpretation at the center of contemporary art. For Jacques Lacan, for instance, there is no pre-discursive reality; everything is mediated by language and the symbolic.6

Constructivist-leaning thinkers like Nelson Goodman go so far as to say that worlds are “made” by our symbolic systems. For Goodman, that is, we don’t actually come to understand the world; in trying to understand it, we literally “make” it.7

Despite all their differences, the many twentieth-century intellectual movements that laid the theoretical foundations of contemporary art share a common emphasis on the “mediated” character of human experience and knowledge. These philosophies argue that we never grasp reality directly, but always through the lens of our own cognitive or discursive frames, and in one way or another they put the human at the center.

Correlationism

In the first part of this series I used examples to discuss the key role of interpretation and viewer experience in contemporary art. Suhail Malik, whose critique I’ve drawn on extensively, argued that contemporary art depends on the viewer’s subjective experience, and on the interpretation of that experience, to “complete” the meaning of the artwork.8 For this reason, he claims, from a speculative realist perspective contemporary art holds a “correlationist” stance and therefore needs to be “destroyed.” Malik asks what art might be outside contemporary art. (Really, why do we accept contemporary art as a system we have to integrate into, without adequately questioning it and without imagining any alternative?)

In this piece, I’ll try to unpack the notion of correlationism that lies at the root of Malik’s critique, why it is seen as a problem, and what it means to call contemporary art correlationist, drawing on several thinkers along the way.

Correlationism is a term Quentin Meillassoux coined to describe the model of thinking that dominates philosophy in a lineage stretching from Immanuel Kant to the twentieth-century movements I mentioned under “Interpretation.” On this view, “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being.”9 Neither of the two, considered apart from the other, can be grasped on its own. To speak of the independent existence of objects is futile; reality is constituted only through the mutual “dependence” of subject and object. Every knowledge claim must therefore be qualified with “for us.” Access to the outer world, to an absolute reality, to a “thing in itself” that is not relative to us and that exists whether or not we think it, is barred.

“We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out.”10

Before the rise of modern philosophy, traces of realism could be found in inquiries into being. Aristotle, for example, defended independent existence through the unity of matter and form, while Thomas Aquinas argued that the world is a reality created by God and graspable by human reason. With the advent of modern philosophy, however, a major shift took place. René Descartes, by emphasizing the certainty of the cogito (“I think, therefore I am”), granted priority to the thinking subject and raised the problem of skepticism: if the only thing we can be sure of is our own thought, how can we be sure of the existence of an outer world?

Taking up this problem in order to ground knowledge, Kant argued that we cannot know things as they are in themselves (noumena); we can only know the world as it appears to us (as phenomena), through the mind’s structuring activity.

Imagine we come across a rock. We see its shape, color, and texture. But what the rock is “really” like cannot be known. The reason is that our perceptions of it are always filtered through our senses and our mind. When we perceive the rock, our senses deliver raw data such as its shape, color, and texture. This data is then processed by the mind. In order to make sense of the data, the mind applies predefined categories. The result is that we experience a rock with its color, texture, and hardness. The noumenon is the rock’s unknowable reality; the phenomenon is the rock as we experience it.

In explaining how we come to have knowledge of the phenomenal world (the world we perceive), Kant ties this to the structuring function of the mind. This is an epistemological claim: “How do we know the world?” Yet within this epistemological frame, being (ontology) indirectly becomes mind-dependent as well. That is, in Kant’s system being ends up defined by the way we are able to know it.

Maurizio Ferraris argues that Kant’s solution gave rise to a crucial error whose effects are still with us: “what I have called the ‘transcendental fallacy’: that is, the confusion between ontology and epistemology, between what there is and what we know (or think we know) about what there is.”11

Put differently, being itself and how we know it get mixed together:

“Here is the origin of postmodernism. Following and radicalizing Kant, constructionists will confuse, without residues (i.e., also abolishing the noumenon), ontology with epistemology: what there is (and is not dependent on conceptual schemes) and what we know (and depends on conceptual schemes). The two things, of course, are not the same, because the fact of knowing that this key lets me open the front door (epistemology) does not allow me to open the door if I have lost the key in question (ontology).”12

Why Is Correlationism a Problem?

Correlationism isn’t a problem we can easily climb out of. Even if we accept the existence of an outer world, each thinker has their own view about how this is to be shown, and at what levels and to what extent such access is actually achievable. I can’t get into those details here, but in general, the heart of the problem is the question of how to overcome the dependence relation between thought and reality.

If reality is seen as merely a product of the relation between subject and object, the existence of an outer world is also thrown into question. It becomes impossible to speak of an independent outer reality against which our interpretations could be tested, or on which objective knowledge could be built. This view leads to an extreme relativism in which every perspective is equally valid and any objective distinction between true and false becomes impossible. Under such conditions, the legitimacy of different kinds of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, will also be called into question. It becomes meaningless, for instance, to talk about subatomic particles, or about dinosaurs that existed before us and that we have never directly observed.

On the other hand, limiting existence to the human vantage point is a form of parochialism, akin to thinking that the Earth sits at the center of the universe. Correlationism, especially in the context of art, tends to give human thought and experience a privileged status. At its root lies our habit of binding thought inseparably to the human.

Being human is of course not itself a problem. The problem is placing the human at the center and arranging beings in a hierarchy around it. This leads us to understand matter not as an independent reality that exists outside the human frame, but only as a reality that the human perceives or conceptualizes. That opens the door to an idealist approach that dismisses the ontological independence of beings altogether.

The practical effects of these views are felt across many areas of life. Fallacies ranging from the idea that lethal viruses can only be produced by powerful humans to claims that we are living in a simulation, or life-threatening stances such as climate denial, are all examples rooted in a human-centered perspective and in an inability to perceive anything outside the human construction.

In the context of art, the issue is less about imagining an art without humans (though I find that a delightful idea) and more about questioning the assumption that human-centeredness, that is, human experience, perception, and meaning-making, functions as the absolute standard. Art is not only a field of aesthetic expression; it is also an ontological domain. Dismantling the correlationist frame reflects a desire for art, and for thought more broadly, to reach a fuller understanding of independence and objectivity.

Why Is Contemporary Art Correlationist?

For Malik, contemporary art is correlationist because it centers on “aesthetic experience.” Since the meaning of the work is completed by the viewer’s individual responses to, and interpretations of, that aesthetic experience, contemporary art cannot step outside the bounds of subjectivity.

“For all their considerable differences, experience is the key category in theories central to contemporary art: it sits on both sides of Michael Fried’s split between absorption and theatricality; it is the condition of Jacques Rancière’s ‘aesthetic regime of art,’ whose political effects are the reorganization of experience; it is the term of the intractable that can only be felt or sensed through its materiality (Jean-François Lyotard), or of the singularities of affect that can be mobilized but not perceived or conceptualized (Gilles Deleuze), or events that escape the consistency and logic of identification in an inaesthetics (Alain Badiou).”13

The philosophies that directly feed contemporary art converge in their guarded stance toward conceptualization. Each insists that the artwork must remain tied to a subjective field of experience. If that field is opened to reflection or rationalization, the work itself will be undone. Interpretation does not close off the work or fully explain it; on the contrary, it keeps repeating the very emphasis on that unexplainability.

For Malik, even an ostensibly objective, material-focused art cannot escape the centrality of experience. The emphasis on materiality in art carries the same desire for the primacy of sensory and spatio-temporal experience:

“How else to apprehend the chromatic bounciness of the print, the light-sucking bleakness of the sculpture, the gloopy resilience of the paint in relation to the figures presented in such material presentation?”14

In these material emphases, the artwork is defined as though it possessed an excess, ineffable being, something before which there can only be an articulation, a linguistic aftereffect that necessarily misses or misapprehends it:

“That presence is of a material order other to language’s semantic and transferrable dimension. While Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois proposed an art-historical mobilization of this insistent meaninglessness under the Bataillean name of the informe…”15

Exits

One might expect that a non-correlationist art would develop along lines parallel to today’s realist philosophies. On this track, we have seen approaches such as object-oriented ontology and new materialism show up in many recent exhibitions. Object-oriented ontology holds that objects exist independently of human consciousness and are defined by their own intrinsic qualities. New materialism emphasizes that matter is an active, productive force that can generate meaning independently of human thought and language. At first glance, these ideas seem to offer an alternative to contemporary art’s correlationist fixation on subjectivity and interpretation. In principle, art could step outside the narrow bounds of human experience and explore the realities proper to objects and to matter.

For Malik, however, these approaches too, as they land in art, fail to shake their dependence on aesthetic experience. In his view, they don’t go much further than reproducing aesthetic experience and subjectivity in a new guise inside the art world. Heavily influenced by Ray Brassier’s philosophy, the art Malik proposes instead moves entirely away from aesthetic experience and takes objective knowledge and rationality as its foundation. This proposal calls for a radical questioning of the current foundations of art, and puts forward forms that we may have trouble recognizing as art at all.

If art is placed on a rational foundation, can it still be called “art”? What form can an art far removed from aesthetic experience take? Is speculative realism our only alternative when it comes to realism?

In the next part I’ll take up, in detail and with examples from specific artworks, attempts to exit correlationism through art, along with Malik’s own proposal.

Footnotes

  1. Maurizio Ferraris, Hysteresis: The External World, ed. and trans. Sarah De Sanctis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 232. ↩

  2. Suhail Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” in Realism Materialism Art, ed. Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, and Suhail Malik (London: Sternberg Press, 2015), 186. ↩

  3. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 7. [Turkish edition cited in the original article: Yoruma Karşı, trans. Osman Akınhay (Istanbul: Agora Yayınları, 2015).] ↩

  4. Theodore George, “Hermeneutics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. ↩

  5. Gary Aylesworth, “Postmodernism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. ↩

  6. Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. ↩

  7. Daniel Cohnitz and Marcus Rossberg, “Nelson Goodman,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. ↩

  8. Malik, op. cit. ↩

  9. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5. [Turkish edition cited in the original article: Sonluluğun Sonrası: Olumsallığın Zorunluluğu Üzerine Deneme, trans. Kağan Kahveci (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2020).] ↩

  10. Ibid., 7. Page note: the Turkish edition cites p. 9; in the Brassier/Continuum English edition the passage falls on p. 7, where Meillassoux quotes Francis Wolff and glosses the “transparent cage” image. ↩

  11. Ferraris, Hysteresis, 317. ↩

  12. Maurizio Ferraris, Manifesto of New Realism, trans. Sarah De Sanctis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 27–28. [Turkish edition cited in the original article: Yeni Gerçekçilik Manifestosu, trans. Kemal Atakay (Istanbul: Kolektif Kitap, 2019).] ↩

  13. Malik, “Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art,” 186. ↩

  14. Ibid., 186–187. ↩

  15. Ibid., 187. ↩