Philosophy of the Performing Arts

appreciating performable works in performance 59
both the performable work and its performances that is strikingly different
from the one suggested by our discussion thus far. We must therefore assess
whether what may be termed the “Goodman argument” should lead us to
revise the methodological assumptions that have guided us, at least implic-
itly, in our inquiries.^11
Goodman begins by asking why we can have forgeries of existing works
in painting and sculpture whereas we cannot have such forgeries in literature
and the performed arts. This cannot be explained in terms of the singular
nature of the former art forms. For we can have forgeries of existing works
in printmaking and lithography, which are multiple arts. Rather, Goodman
maintains, what matters is whether something’s status as a work-instance
of a given work can be divorced from that thing’s history of production. The
question is whether, given some entity e , it is possible to determine whether
or not e is a work-instance of a work W without determining how e was pro-
duced or generated. A forgery of an artwork W is something that presents
itself as having a history of making that it actually lacks, where having that
history, so Goodman maintains, is a necessary condition for being a work-
instance of W. We see this in the case of paintings. A forgery of the Mona Lisa
presents itself as coming from the hand of Leonardo, and only if it does come
from the hand of Leonardo can it be a work-instance (and indeed the solitary
work-instance) of the work. In the case of painting, sculpture, prints, and
lithography, according to Goodman, we cannot divorce status as a work-
instance of a work from history of production. Thus the misrepresentation
of that history in a forgery is possible.
However, Goodman argues, in literature and the performed arts, we
do have a means of identifying work-instances of works without recourse
to history of production. This is possible because there exist conventions
or practices which specify, without making reference to history of produc-
tion, the properties something must have in order to be a work-instance of
a work. In order to specify the properties required in instances of a work
without reference to their history of production, Goodman maintains, we
need something that performs the function of a notation. In the case of litera-
ture, the notation in question is provided by the linguistic resources used in
constructing the exemplar of the work:
To verify the spelling or to spell correctly is all that is required to identify an
instance of the work or to produce a new instance. In effect, the fact that a
literary work is in a definite notation, consisting of certain signs or characters
that are to be combined by concatenation, provides the means for distinguish-
ing the properties constitutive of the work from all contingent properties –
that is, for fixing the required features and the limits of permissible variation
in each. (Goodman 1976, 116)