subjectivity

how we view art, how we view people, how we view the world

Cecily Brown, Selfie, 2020

I love this Ad Reinhardt illustration about how to look at abstract art.

When we view a work of art in a museum, we have this temptation to try to understand the artist’s intention, as if there were a singular truth behind the piece. You either “get it” or you don’t and move on to the next one.

Formal education doesn’t prepare us to experience art on a personal level. Instead, we’re trained to analyze the great masterpieces according to the conventions of a particular movement or style, framed by the hindsight of historical context. We're taught, for example, to appreciate Le Corbusier through his influence on modern architecture, his theories about form and function, his legacy in urban planning.

Similarly, as I was reading Katie Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, I found myself trying to figure out the author’s intention in order to piece together what’s really going on in the story. This inquiry was fruitless. There’s no one way to understand the book. Kitamura describes it as a “multiverse.” Meaning unfolds in the mutable space between the work and the audience. Re-reading Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady at thirty or forty, the story takes on a different shape than it did when one first encountered it at twenty. The text hasn’t changed, but your frame of reference has.

Audition celebrates uncertainty as a necessary condition for creating and interpreting art. In a conversation with Tess Gunty at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, Kitamura said she was interested in ceding narrative authority. She initially avoided using first person point-of-view because she saw it as “an easy mechanism for narrative control.” Later, she recognized the ability of the first person to express uncertainty.

We bring so much of ourselves to bear upon a work of art: what we notice, what we ignore, what we fixate on are informed by our lived experience, sociocultural conditioning, and cognitive frameworks. Whether a piece speaks to us has more to do with who we are in this moment than any inherent quality of the work itself.

The same is true of how we view people.

We might feel instantly drawn to someone we’ve just met. Another person might touch a particular nerve. Just as we seek universal meaning in a work of art, we instinctively search for fixed truths about people. But how we receive someone has more to do with our own baggage than any innate quality of that person. This is not something we consider when we’re bickering with our partner or irritated with a friend. Because we’re so entrenched in our subjectivity, we externalize the problem as entirely “about them.”

From an early age, we were taught to weave meaning out of disparate pieces of information—that instinct to create stories is how we make sense of the world. We can’t help but narrativize. When the person you’ve just started dating does something baffling, your brain automatically tries to construct a story to explain their behavior, then searches for evidence and social validation to support it.

There isn’t a singular, objective truth about a person. How you interpret someone, how you receive them, is as close to the truth as you can get. To embrace our subjectivity is to acknowledge how much power we have in making meaning of the world around us.

In Audition, the two men in the narrator’s life, Xavier and Tomas, shape-shift and take on new “roles” in much the same way that characters in dreams do. Who they are is immaterial. What matters is how the narrator perceives them and their relative positions in her life.

In Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development, fourth-order thinking is the “self-authored mind.” This is trusting your own inner seat of judgment and authority, being able to think independently of your tribe. Imagine that instead of searching for the “correct way” of understanding a work of art, you trusted your own interpretation.

But there’s a higher order of consciousness that is the “self-transforming mind.” It’s characterized by an ability to hold multiple systems of thought, identity, and meaning simultaneously, recognizing each one’s limitations, including the self-authored one. The self is seen as fluid, evolving, and interconnected. As you transcend the orders of consciousness, there’s a shift from subject (something embedded in you that you can’t see) to object (something you can step back from and observe).

One way to practice fifth-order thinking is to interrogate your frame of reference, noticing how it shapes your perception and trying to hold multiple truths without privileging one perspective. If there was ever a novel that exemplified Kegan’s fifth order of consciousness, Audition is one.

It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave: If you’re not aware of the existence of the cave and the sun casting shadows on the walls, you would take the illusion of reality as the only truth. When you become aware of the apparatus of your mind’s eye creating meaning, you can shift perspectives. You’re no longer confined to just one way of seeing.

So “What do you represent?” is an apt question.