The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project

Workshop and research discussion

Saturday 20 January 2024, 10am-5pm

St John’s College, Oxford

We announce a one-day workshop, Richard Wollheim’s Philosophy and the Arts, to be held at St John’s College, Oxford on Saturday 20 January 2024.

The workshop will be in two parts. The morning session (10am-1:30pm) will feature 30-minute presentations, detailed below, which engage with the theme of the workshop. The afternoon session (2:30pm-5pm) will be given over to a discussion of future directions for research on this theme.

Louise Braddock (Independent Scholar), ‘Wollheim and Iconicity’  

Philosophical engagement with Wollheim’s work has largely been within the philosophy of art, and what it takes, or takes over, from psychoanalysis. But if we understand Wollheim’s intention in bringing art and psychoanalysis together as an equal commitment to both disciplines then we could expect to see each contribute equally to the other. Nevertheless, despite the systematic nature of his psychoanalytic thought, the relation with art in terms of conceptual exchange looks to be one way; few concepts from art and art criticism appear in his philosophy of psychoanalysis. While this imbalance is in part rectified by the ‘reflection’ back into the psychoanalytic conception of the self of an artistically enhanced sensibility, to leave things here would be to lose specificity in what art might supply. In my paper I look at one concept which art directly supplies to psychoanalytic philosophy: iconicity.

Vanessa Brassey (King’s College London), ‘Time for Twofoldness’

Wollheim’s interest in the psychology of art was intimately linked to his obsession with pictorial space. Pictorial space, he argued, enabled paintings to become a ‘form of life’, transforming the canvas ‘into a body’, and a ‘container for traumas and emotions’. And he wrote many insightful and compelling articles about specific paintings, exploring the senses in which the artist expressed their trauma in them. Yet he failed to demonstrate how pictorial space enabled this complex expressiveness. Instead, he relied on an idiosyncratic concept of ‘double projection’ which was thrown out of serious philosophical investigation due to insurmountable objections raised by Malcom Budd.

Yet the ghosts of his good ideas continue to haunt several rueful scholars who suspect that the baby was thrown out with the bath water. In this talk I attempt to recapitulate the elusive concept of double projection in layman’s terms. I then argue that Wollheim’s key ambition – to link specific lived traumas to their expression in paint – could have been satisfied by extending his account of pictorial space. A quick sketch of how this could go illuminates a second, hitherto overlooked, feature of paintings that is required for expressiveness; a feature that may in different circumstances have eventually been articulated by Wollheim himself. All he really needed, was time.

Elisa Galgut (University of Cape Town), ‘Misrepresentation and the Archaic Theory of Mind’

Ordinary mental states like belief and desires are self-representational: if Phoebe believes that there is chocolate cake on the table, she will reach out to take a slice, whereas if she only desires that there be chocolate cake on the table, she will not. This is, in part, because Phoebe believes that in believing there is a cake there, her state of mind is telling her how things are in the world, as against her desire for a cake, which is attuned to how she wants things to be. If she mistakes her own state of mind and takes her wish to be a belief she has, this will cause Phoebe to behave in ways that are mistaken; she may, for instance, fight someone for the (non-existent) cake.

This sort of mistake becomes systematic under what Wollheim terms the ‘archaic theory of mind’. In its grip, the person is fundamentally mistaken about their own states of mind, whose very makeup includes a mis-representation. How do such states function, and why are they so important for Psychoanalysis?

Charlie Gere (Lancaster University), ‘Wollheim’s Babylon’

In my presentation I look at another side of Richard Wollheim – his relation to London – drawing on his novel, A Family Romance (1969), and ‘Babylon Babylone’, a little-known essay published in Encounter magazine in 1962, as well as accounts from my mother of visiting Wollheim in both of his West London addresses (my father knew Wollheim at Balliol). The London Wollheim knew was the same one I was born and brought up in, which I wrote about in my book World’s End (2022). It was the world of Oxbridge-educated intelligentsia, who colonised and gentrified areas such as the World’s End and Fulham and worked, as both my father and Wollheim did, in Bloomsbury. Understanding Wollheim’s position in this milieu sheds light on his understanding of art.

Niall Gildea (York St John University and Lancaster University), ‘Wollheim as a Theorist of Literature’

Wollheim’s theory of visual artistic expression is a major component of his oeuvre and a fundamental concern of the Wollheim Centenary Project. Less well-known, because less sustained, is his theory of literature; indeed, there are grounds to doubt whether he has one at all. In this paper, I give an account of the two places in Wollheim’s corpus where something that looks like a theory of literature is developed. Supplementing these with his model of the critic’s work of ‘retrieval’, and his case study of T. S. Eliot’s change from philosophical to literary writing, I try to adumbrate – with caveats – a Wollheimian theory of literature.  

Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com. It is essential that you indicate whether you will be attending the morning presentations, the afternoon research discussion, or both.

Please confirm your status as academic (includes students), mental health practitioner, or other (please specify). A confirmation email with further details about the venue will be sent to attendees.