Walter Benjamin (in “The Storyteller”) laments the loss of reminiscence represented by Modernity. He relates this form of memory to the storyteller, who has his roots in oral tradition. These days, he argues, we are attracted by the verifiability of information, its capacity to give us a coherent story. This is reason at it’s best, Nietzsche’s Apolline, which claims that it can fit each piece into the puzzle. Thus, Benjamin argues, rememberence is “dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle” (Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 86).
Modernity’s information-driven consciousness lends itself to a linear (i.e., ultimate) conception of historical understanding, which Levi-Strauss juxtaposes with the repetitive nature of myths (which, like Freud’s dream-content, employ layers of overdetermined meaning). He positions an initial break from myth-mindedness at the moment man adopted writing (“From Tristes Tropique”, in NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 1282). As a contrast to Modernity, Levi-Strauss points to all ancient civilization and a few contemporary societies (dwindling in number) which continue to live outside of history, relying instead on repeated cycles (e.g., seasons, lifetimes) to pattern an existence which resists the idea of permanent and irrevocable change (“The Savage Mind”, in Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 98-99).
Frye attempts to mark our descent into historical time onto the development of fiction. He sees modern literary development as a displacement away from myths--which like Freud’s dream-wish, represent “the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire”--and toward the “verisimilitude” represented in realist and naturalist fiction (126). However, what Frye takes for realism, for the “plausibility” realized in modern fiction, is nothing more than that same ‘historical’ conception of our surroundings which Modernity has helped to develop in us. (Frye's definition of "real" is precisely opposite to Nietzsche's.) In an attempt to follow his analysis to its dialectical end, Frye usefully suggests that the most recent, ironic, mode of fiction might represent the beginning of a move backward along the axis.
Indeed, Marxist dialectic adopts the cyclical understanding of the myth-mind and applies it to swaths of time and space (i.e., to societal dream-content) which are possible only in their historical relationship to the linear, text- and information-driven history represented by Modernity. Marxism represents a post-historical, post-Enlightenment understanding which is also evident in post-modernism.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Nietzsche's Not-logic
How much of life is a battle between logic and not-logic. Whatever is the opposite of logic is what Nietzsche hopes to represent in the Dionysiac: logic’s dialectical antithesis. It is the same not-logic that dominates Freud’s conception of our unconscious. It is what ever is not-logical that compels people to believe in gods. Hegel praised the ascendancy of logic. Marx tended to lament it. How does capitalism (as we understand it) represent logical tendencies taken to extremes? In what way does Marxism or postmodernism, advocate a return to not-logic?
Every (major or minor) social revolution seems to begin in Dionysiac frenzy, a sudden, brief, but extreme restructuring of social and psychological ideas around not-logic, followed by a slow rehabilitation into a state of Apolline logic. This is easiest to see in war (especially simplified in revolutionary civil war, a physical changing of the guard). It is equally true for revolutions in thought. Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, all those theoretical arguments that align themselves with not-logic, whose theoretical implications rock our human understanding to its core, insodoing tend to stir up the Dionysiac embers embedded in each (and all) of us. However, all of these revolutionary ideas also end up incorporated into logical patterns of thought, given logical applications.
As Hegel and Marx seem unable (unwilling?) to do, Benjamin conceives of this cycle not as progress toward some final synthesis, but as an ongoing and continuous process of dialectical potentiality. The dialectic compels us to consider where we stand within this cycle.
But how does our hope that things get better drive us to act, and what is the consequence of a position which denies the concept of progress?
Every (major or minor) social revolution seems to begin in Dionysiac frenzy, a sudden, brief, but extreme restructuring of social and psychological ideas around not-logic, followed by a slow rehabilitation into a state of Apolline logic. This is easiest to see in war (especially simplified in revolutionary civil war, a physical changing of the guard). It is equally true for revolutions in thought. Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, all those theoretical arguments that align themselves with not-logic, whose theoretical implications rock our human understanding to its core, insodoing tend to stir up the Dionysiac embers embedded in each (and all) of us. However, all of these revolutionary ideas also end up incorporated into logical patterns of thought, given logical applications.
As Hegel and Marx seem unable (unwilling?) to do, Benjamin conceives of this cycle not as progress toward some final synthesis, but as an ongoing and continuous process of dialectical potentiality. The dialectic compels us to consider where we stand within this cycle.
But how does our hope that things get better drive us to act, and what is the consequence of a position which denies the concept of progress?
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Oscar Wilde and "The Critic as Artist"
Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist (Excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents an interesting synthesis of many of the ideas I have heretofore been exploring.
In a strict sense, he seems to be interested in extending and refining the role of the critic put forward by Matthew Arnold in his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (also, conveniently anthologized in my Norton). Arnold holds that it is the function of criticism "to see the object as in itself it really is" (695), a notion with which Wilde assertively disagrees. As the title of the work suggests, he holds the critic in high regards as an artist in his own right, who uses the works of artists as they in turn have used the material world: as a point from which to jump in the creation of something wholly new. He seems to anticipate reader response criticism when he states that the artwork is not "expressive," but "impressive," and that Criticism is "in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another" (800). Criticism, for Wilde, has no interest in discovering the true intentions of the artist; that is a shallow endeavor. Rather, Criticism must use the artwork as a pallet upon which to read "the record of one's own soul" (799).
Arnold maintain that criticism lays the philosophical groundwork upon which art is built. Wilde suggests, "There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the world, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house" (796). It is, in fact, to this effect that Arnold sets about writing his essay to begin with. He sees a certain deficiency in the age from which he writes, a deficiency which he believes makes the creation of any true art impossible; the absence in Arnold's England of the "national glow of life and thought" which makes epochs of great art possible, leaves contemporary art wanting "materials and a basis" which might allow it "a thorough interpretation of the world" (698). It is the function of Arnold's proposed turn to criticism to create such an era of inquiry. Wilde agrees, stating that "there has never been a creative age that has not also been a critical age" (796).
Arnold still holds the "free creative activity" found in great art to be the "highest function of man," and so seems to position criticism as a somewhat lesser, albeit equally necessary, pursuit (696). Wilde sees no such distinction. Indeed, the very title of his work suggests as much: the critic does not stand in relation to the artist, but rather becomes an artist himself as he experiences and interprets the art of others. For Wilde, Criticism in its highest form is "more creative than [artistic] creation" because it relates not to the world, but to one's soul; in this sense, Criticism becomes a more pure realization of Hegel's self-consciousness, which Wilde holds to be essential to the creation of true art (799). Wilde even goes so far, at times, as to (somewhat humorously) denigrate the artistic function. Of authors, for example, he says, "Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature" (797), and he attributes to the Mona Lisa the possibility that da Vinci was "merely the slave of an archaic smile" (800).
Wilde's concept of Beauty echoes and revises that of Kant. Kant asserts that "the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good" ("From Critique of the Power of Judgment," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 449). Wilde parallels the sentence of Kant's when he claims that "Beauty is the symbol of symbols" ("The Critic As Artist," p. 802). For Kant, establishing the subjective universality of Beauty was essential, and he went to great lengths to eliminate all interest from the aesthetic judgment of an artwork. In Kant's aesthetic, beauty must have no purpose, and all judgment of beauty lies within the person who is judging. Wilde takes in these concepts and states that "because it expresses nothing," Beauty offers the opportunity to the Critic to "put into it whatever one wishes" (802). Beauty, according to Wilde, "has as many meanings as man has moods," and Criticism of artwork offers the opportunity to bring to fuller light "a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely" (802). That the artwork is somehow incomplete for the artist is an idea first raised by Shelley, who saw in the works of Dante and Milton the possibility of interpretations that the artists themselves could not have anticipated. Wilde echoes this concept when assigns to his Critic the role of "always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age" (806).
Wilde's concept of Beauty echoes and revises that of Kant. Kant asserts that "the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good" ("From Critique of the Power of Judgment," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 449). Wilde parallels the sentence of Kant's when he claims that "Beauty is the symbol of symbols" ("The Critic As Artist," p. 802). For Kant, establishing the subjective universality of Beauty was essential, and he went to great lengths to eliminate all interest from the aesthetic judgment of an artwork. In Kant's aesthetic, beauty must have no purpose, and all judgment of beauty lies within the person who is judging. Wilde takes in these concepts and states that "because it expresses nothing," Beauty offers the opportunity to the Critic to "put into it whatever one wishes" (802). Beauty, according to Wilde, "has as many meanings as man has moods," and Criticism of artwork offers the opportunity to bring to fuller light "a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely" (802). That the artwork is somehow incomplete for the artist is an idea first raised by Shelley, who saw in the works of Dante and Milton the possibility of interpretations that the artists themselves could not have anticipated. Wilde echoes this concept when assigns to his Critic the role of "always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age" (806).
There are aspects of Wilde's work which call to mind Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" as well; foremost perhaps is Wilde's insistence that it is the primary aim of the writer to lie willfully. What Nietzsche asserts gravely, however--that we are blind to our reality because of our immersion in a lie--Wilde approaches playfully; he seems to register Nietzsche's concerns even as he acknowledges them as the components of the great play-thing that is human existence. In his exploration of the critic, in fact, Wilde builds an argument that echoes Nietzsche's at each step, while at each turn reversing the "tone of grim intensity" that pervades Nietzsche in favor of a certain frivolity (Editor's note, p. 78). Wilde first acknowledges indirectly Nietzsche's skepticism of language when he asserts that language "is the parent, and not the child, of thought" (797). Wilde maintains a certain level of pride in the human animal, who through language can "rise above" "lower" lifeforms (797). Where Nietzsche criticizes language for its roll in constructing a false sense of reality, Wilde praises this linguistic function in human existence:
...it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous [sic], more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realize their perfection (798).
One can see that Wilde uses the word true just as Nietzsche would, to describe the constructed reality revealed through the employment of language. Language divides us from the crude rule of mere action, which Wilde points out any animal may achieve, calling action "a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious" (797). Wilde's man of action here begins to sound a bit like Nietzsche's intuitive man.
As Wilde describes the way in which the critic interacts with the artist, he does so in a way that hearkens the role that Nietzsche assigns to Science. For Nietzsche, science "works unceasingly" to fit the world of primary concepts, concepts more or less created as metaphors for reality, into a "columbarium," a great framework which imposes metaphors upon metaphors and thus removes humanity ever farther from the primary experience of reality (771). Similarly, Wilde's critic
occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought (798-99).
As Nietzsche's Science piles metaphor upon metaphor, so Wilde's criticism is "a creation within a creation," and just as Nietzsche condemns Science for this tendency, Wilde praises criticism as "the purest form of personal impression" because "it has least reference to any standard external to itself" (799).
Reading Wilde, I am struck by the way in which he constructs his arguments. As is evident in the above analysis, he is interesting not so much for the originality of his ideas, but for the wild (read, "Wilde") spin he puts on the ideas of others. He uses the dialogue format to highlight the ostensible absurdity of his theses, and then shows them to arise out of a certain point of view taken on past theoretical work. It is, of course, the subjective point of view which arrives as the champion of Wilde's Criticism, and employing just such a point of view serves to demonstrate the very theory he is positing.
Reading Wilde, I am struck by the way in which he constructs his arguments. As is evident in the above analysis, he is interesting not so much for the originality of his ideas, but for the wild (read, "Wilde") spin he puts on the ideas of others. He uses the dialogue format to highlight the ostensible absurdity of his theses, and then shows them to arise out of a certain point of view taken on past theoretical work. It is, of course, the subjective point of view which arrives as the champion of Wilde's Criticism, and employing just such a point of view serves to demonstrate the very theory he is positing.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Metadrama and Metacinema
Insofar as a play is metadramatic, it is a commentary on social conditions. By commenting on its own status--as play, as entertainment--it comments also on the status of the play as philosophy, i.e. it comments on its own performance in society. Metadrama might be called a commentary of the plays performative aspect: what does the play do to its audience as a performance? Any single performance which comments on its own artifice, calls into the mind the artifice of performance in general, and so casts the audience's gaze back on itself, in search of final meaning. In this regard, metadramatic performance is a true mirror held up to nature.
It might be that all performance is metadramatic in some sense. Does performance, which places in front of us an imitation of human action--be it "realistic" or stylized, do we not still understand it as imitated--naturally encourage its audience to reflect on human action in general, to wonder about its status as reality? The reflection that the metadramatic performance induces is political only in a sense: The play encourages its audience members to analyze the broader systems of performed action in which they are embedded.
With regards to films it seems that, as with most art in the mechanical age, this metadramatic quality becomes strictly more political. Certainly we also recognize the actions in a film as being imitations, but the spacial and temporal, as well as social, mediation that the film medium represents perhaps obscures for us the same capacity to recognize the imitated action as being human. That is not to say that plays are unmediated (I have explored the notion previously), but in performance, generally those responsible for all mediation and artistic interpretation are at hand, vis-a-vis the performers themselves (and, at the Globe theater and elsewhere, even often the playwright). Perhaps it is because in film we recognize the anonymity of these mediators (their anonymity glares in the metacinematic quality of the film itself) that film, rather than calling into question the audience's role as performer, instead calls into question its own status as qualified performer.
When an actor portrays a character on stage, or a musician plays and sings his song, or a politician comes before us to speak, we are aware to some extent of an ultimately accountable individual for this individual performance. In a film, such accountability is not immediately apparent. Indeed, it is part of the artifice of the film that any concrete accountability is continually obscured. Benjamin points out:
The film, with its single point of view, its multiple cuts, its artificial lighting, its shifts in time and space, does not allow us to identify with any element of the human agency that is so crucial to live performance. We understand in the film that the actor is not performing the actions portrayed; these actions are performed rather in the lighting lab and the editing room. Just as we understand that is not, indeed, we who are watching the actor, but the camera itself. We are consigned to watch the machine. Our anxiety over this fact often makes us suspicious that the machine watches us in return (cf. Orwell, Clark & Kubrik, the Wachowskis).
The play reflects the audience only in its nature as a live performance. This immediate human interaction cannot be underestimated. By putting before us a human like us, the play participates in a reenactment of the Hegelian struggle for identity. If we leave the theater questioning the motives behind the performances of others, it is only because we have first reflected on the motives of our own performances. This is a philosophical reflection.
Because the film can reflect on itself without in doing so reflecting its audience as individuals, it does not tend immediately toward matters of philosophy. Rather, if the film calls for reflection at all, it calls for social and political reflection, in that it calls into mind man's relationship to the machine. It is likely, however, that film doesn't immediately call for reflection of any kind; its capacity for a distracted reception, as outlined by Benjamin, suggests that any natural tendency toward reflection that film inherits is is refracted by the immediacy of the film medium itself. Any attempt to interpret a film as metadramatic performance, to read its interaction with the audience, tends either to feel pressed and somewhat hollow, or else endlessly complicated by matters of Marxist materialism.
It might be that all performance is metadramatic in some sense. Does performance, which places in front of us an imitation of human action--be it "realistic" or stylized, do we not still understand it as imitated--naturally encourage its audience to reflect on human action in general, to wonder about its status as reality? The reflection that the metadramatic performance induces is political only in a sense: The play encourages its audience members to analyze the broader systems of performed action in which they are embedded.
With regards to films it seems that, as with most art in the mechanical age, this metadramatic quality becomes strictly more political. Certainly we also recognize the actions in a film as being imitations, but the spacial and temporal, as well as social, mediation that the film medium represents perhaps obscures for us the same capacity to recognize the imitated action as being human. That is not to say that plays are unmediated (I have explored the notion previously), but in performance, generally those responsible for all mediation and artistic interpretation are at hand, vis-a-vis the performers themselves (and, at the Globe theater and elsewhere, even often the playwright). Perhaps it is because in film we recognize the anonymity of these mediators (their anonymity glares in the metacinematic quality of the film itself) that film, rather than calling into question the audience's role as performer, instead calls into question its own status as qualified performer.
When an actor portrays a character on stage, or a musician plays and sings his song, or a politician comes before us to speak, we are aware to some extent of an ultimately accountable individual for this individual performance. In a film, such accountability is not immediately apparent. Indeed, it is part of the artifice of the film that any concrete accountability is continually obscured. Benjamin points out:
“The shooting of a film...presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of vision the equipment...unless the alighment of the spectator’s pupil coincided with that of the camera.” ("The Work of Art," Second Version, published in The Work of Art... (2008). Harvard UP, pp. 34-35)
The film, with its single point of view, its multiple cuts, its artificial lighting, its shifts in time and space, does not allow us to identify with any element of the human agency that is so crucial to live performance. We understand in the film that the actor is not performing the actions portrayed; these actions are performed rather in the lighting lab and the editing room. Just as we understand that is not, indeed, we who are watching the actor, but the camera itself. We are consigned to watch the machine. Our anxiety over this fact often makes us suspicious that the machine watches us in return (cf. Orwell, Clark & Kubrik, the Wachowskis).
The play reflects the audience only in its nature as a live performance. This immediate human interaction cannot be underestimated. By putting before us a human like us, the play participates in a reenactment of the Hegelian struggle for identity. If we leave the theater questioning the motives behind the performances of others, it is only because we have first reflected on the motives of our own performances. This is a philosophical reflection.
Because the film can reflect on itself without in doing so reflecting its audience as individuals, it does not tend immediately toward matters of philosophy. Rather, if the film calls for reflection at all, it calls for social and political reflection, in that it calls into mind man's relationship to the machine. It is likely, however, that film doesn't immediately call for reflection of any kind; its capacity for a distracted reception, as outlined by Benjamin, suggests that any natural tendency toward reflection that film inherits is is refracted by the immediacy of the film medium itself. Any attempt to interpret a film as metadramatic performance, to read its interaction with the audience, tends either to feel pressed and somewhat hollow, or else endlessly complicated by matters of Marxist materialism.
Nietzsche's Truth and Lying
In his essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche paints a picture of humanity “deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images” (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, 765).
He calls into question language’s capacity to relate truths. Nietzsche’s “liar” is only lying insomuch as he is subverting the agreed-upon naming system of society. Nietzsche goes on to deconstruct this naming system, pointing to language’s tendency to generalize experiences and thus disconnect the language of them with the experiences themselves. He goes on the explain the genesis of language in terms of two metaphors.
The first metaphor occurs when “[t]he stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image” (767). It seems easiest to imagine this metaphor in terms of visual stimuli, where photons of light travel to our visual cortex, and our brain receives and interprets the stimuli as some set of images. We “see” a chair because our brain interprets the set of photon data as a specific image. This could apply equally to other senses, though we perhaps have to modify our understanding of the term “image.” Sound waves activate nerve sensors within our inner ear, and our brain resolves these waves into some semblance of order and intelligibility. This order would be the “image” of sound. Thus also for smell, taste, and touch.
Nietzsche’s second metaphor occurs when “[t]he image is then imitated by a sound” (767). This is the creation of language. The nervous receptors of the original stimuli transfer the image data to our verbal centers, which create a verbal representation of the image.
An interesting aspect of this process of language creation as described by Nietzsche is the necessary break between each step in the process. Translating nervous stimulus into image, and then image into sound, the human brain must encounter some very difficult choices. An analogy might be found in the difficulty translators have in capturing the essence of a passage in another language. Some data will be lost. Some amount of meaning will be distorted. Indeed, many hold that translation even between languages is impossible to accomplish effectively. And this between systems of thought designed to accomplish the same or similar tasks (i.e., the verbal representation of real experiences, of Nietzsche’s “nervous stimulation”). Nietzsche puts the difficulty thus: “...[E]ach time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (767). As humans, we tend to gloss over the difficulty that occurs when one type of stimulus is translated into an entirely different sort of data (by way of not one, as Nietzsche points out, but two leaps) so long as this translation is as familiar as that which accompanies language formation. We are more uncomfortable with other forms of the same phenomenon; for example, the experience of tasting colors, which has been attested to by many who have experienced LSD, seems entirely foreign to us. Perhaps a closer examination of such “nonstandard” data translations would help us become aware of just how much of reality is lost in translation.
Nietzsche goes on to discuss “concepts” as the uses of language for individual cases which “must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases” (767). He gives the example of “leaf” and “honesty”, which words do not designate a particular entity in reality, but only a generalized concept of reality which is “formed by dropping...individual differences arbitrarily” (767). Nietzsche asserts that, by way of these generalizations, we create for ourselves a concept of something which does not exist in nature, a prototypical leaf from which all other leaves are designed in our minds. It’s interesting to note that this generalization necessarily begins in (and may take place entirely within) the creation of the first metaphor. When our nerves in our eyes are stimulated by some photons, our translation of this data into image must necessarily draw on the image data already stored in our brains. It is a simplification, to be sure, but it seems as though this sense data may be compared with the experiences of past nervous sensation, and when an alignment is found (between this sensation and others which are associated with the image-concept of ‘leaf’) a generalizing concept is applied. Language, then--the second metaphor--has less work to do.
Nietzsche uses this classification of experience in order to call into question humanity's relationship with the concept of “truth,” which he calls
He (somewhat humorously) returns to the liar with which he began the discussion, stating that humanity's obligation to “truth” is no more than “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all” (768). This construct of humanity, which he acknowledges as “a mighty architectural genius,” nevertheless has no real connection to the world as it is, to Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and Nietzsche calls on man to again awaken to the knowledge of himself “as an artistically creative subject,” though this awakening necessarily means the loss of such “degree of peace, security, and consistency” as is achieved within the dream-image of constructed reality (770).
Nietzsche explains that humanity's continued employment of specific images to relate to specific neural activity, over many generations, has created in our minds a sense of causality, “as if it were the only necessary image” (770). He likens this experience to a dream from which one never wakes, and so takes the dream itself to be reality. The idea of dream-image is intimately taken up by Benjamin, whose phantasmagoria suggests that we are continually caught up in a false understanding of the continuity of reality. Benjamin, too, points to language's tendency to dissolve the concept of flux which is inherent in any concept of reality which attempts to exclude human consciousness. Things as they are do not have continuity, and only in the employment of language do I become an entity which is independent and unchanging.
By calling into question humanity’s access to universal truth, Nietzsche anticipates Postmodern relativism. It’s funny: it seems like I have, for most of my life, been aware of language’s limitations as Nietzsche outlines them, and I am attracted to his theory as foundational partially because it strikes me as somewhat odd that the concept of language’s constructedness could have ever been “new.” My feeling must necessarily stem from my own embeddedness in a set of cultural assumptions which has begun to internalize Nietzsche’s theory. This brings up a certain double paradox of the theory. First of all (and rather plainly), by making his claim that language does not relate to reality, that it distorts truth, Niezsche automatically undercuts his own argument (by virtue of the fact that it, too, is made using language). It’s the philosophical equivalent to saying “nothing I say is true.” But even more paradoxical to me is the idea that Nietzsche’s theory is embedded in a history of philosophy that makes him the inheritor of a great deal of ground work regarding our capacity for reason. It would seem, in other words, that Nietzsche’s own theory denouncing reason could only be reached through a superior employment of reason. Only through a superior self-consciousness can man become conscious of his own self-consciousness.
Nietzsche distinguishes between the man of concepts, regularity and reason, and the man of pretense, myth and immediacy. Modern, enlightened man, he says, will “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions,” but must rather “generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colorful concepts in order to harness the vehicle” of his life to them (768). Nietzsche blames science, which “works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts” for removing humanity into a world of metaphors based on metaphors, and so distancing us even further from any sense of reality. The drive to form metaphors, which Nietzsche acknowledges as a “fundamental human drive,” is not realized in a world structured by science, which hands down its own prepackaged metaphors and gives them the name Truth. This drive, however, might still be realized “in myth and in art generally” (771-72). He turns to pre-Socratic Greek society for an example of man for whom, “thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth...anything is possible at any time, as it is in a dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods” (772). Modern man rarely considers just how much of his life and society functions based on the assumptions that trees will not talk and things, when dropped, will fall to the ground. By calling to mind a people for whom these assumptions did not hold, for whom at best trees usually didn’t talk, Nietzsche challenges us not to start looking for talking trees, but to recognize our position within the construct so that we might realize our own embeddedness in Nature (and thus, perhaps, gain perspective on ourselves as a species). He doesn’t seem to call so much for a total subversion of reason, but for a re-evaluation of reason in relation to its opposite: intuition.
Nietzsche’s hope for art and intuition as a force for revealing new metaphors, for subverting the normative framework of “reality” presented by science and reason, calls to mind Shelley’s assertion that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (From A Defence of Poetry, excerpted in my Norton, p. 596). When Nietzsche’s artist, his “man of intuition[,]...wields his weapons more mightily” than the man of reason, “a culture can take shape...and the rule of art over life can become established” bringing humanity “a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release” (773). Unlike Schiller or Coleridge, who set the imaginative capacity of man over and against natural phenomenon, Nietzsche suggests that our imaginative capacity, our metaphor-drive, is most active when we are closest to nature. When we allow ourselves to abandon the distinction that reason creates between “man” and “nature”, we are most attuned to the magical possibilities that the mysteries of nature present.
Nietzsche is interested in reembedding man in the great family tree of the animal kingdom. He seems to say to humanity, “Get over yourself. You are just a big dumb animal who has distinguished yourself from all other animals only because you happen to be a little less dumb.” He sets his task at the beginning of the essay, when he claims that what is needed is
Nietzsche characterizes human intellect as nothing more than a Darwinian evolutionary tactic for “dissimulation”--for trickery, deceit, and cleverness--made necessary by our lack of “horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (765). From a scientific standpoint, this is probably a relatively accurate (if vastly oversimplified) portrayal. Again, Nietzsche himself must have seen the irony of the situation: His own theories about man’s over-reliance on Science are made possible and given “teeth” (so to speak) only through the advancement of Science. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which deems to delineate all of life into an historical organizing apparatus, must represent for him a supreme example of Science’s propensity for the columbarium, and yet it is only Darwin’s theory which finally, and irrevocably, repositions mankind as nothing more than one possible outcome of a complicated natural phenomenon.
In describing man’s propensity for constructing metaphorical relationships, Nietzsche finds analogies in some of the more complex constructions found in nature (e.g., cobwebs, honeycombs). These analogies give rise to the question, how much of humanity’s “web” of metaphors results from our embeddedness in nature? Nietzsche would have us believe that our metaphorical tendencies, piling metaphor upon metaphor and building an “infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations...on flowing water” are in many ways subverting our natural tendency, dividing us from intuition and mystery (769). However, as he himself admits, “if we could communicate with a midge we would hear that it too floats through the air with the...feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world” (764). This seems to suggest that the tendency to center the universe around oneself is a natural tendency, which implies that a rejection of the constructed concept--a rejection in large part called for by Nietzsche--would represent more of a domination of man’s reason over nature than the original construction itself. Though it is our nature that we construct metaphors to dominate nature, Nietzsche seems to say, now we must begin the process of dominating (by abandoning) our natural tendencies to do so.
I am supremely interested in the limitations of language put forward by Nietzsche. I have been intrigued by the futility of the phrase, “do you know what I mean?” for some time, and I am excited to see where his theories lead. However, it seems essential to recognize Nietzsche’s suspicion of human intellect as an essentially intellectual suspicion, as well as to remember that, when all’s said and done, we are still left with language and action as our only recourse as unifying and organizing social forces.
He calls into question language’s capacity to relate truths. Nietzsche’s “liar” is only lying insomuch as he is subverting the agreed-upon naming system of society. Nietzsche goes on to deconstruct this naming system, pointing to language’s tendency to generalize experiences and thus disconnect the language of them with the experiences themselves. He goes on the explain the genesis of language in terms of two metaphors.
The first metaphor occurs when “[t]he stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image” (767). It seems easiest to imagine this metaphor in terms of visual stimuli, where photons of light travel to our visual cortex, and our brain receives and interprets the stimuli as some set of images. We “see” a chair because our brain interprets the set of photon data as a specific image. This could apply equally to other senses, though we perhaps have to modify our understanding of the term “image.” Sound waves activate nerve sensors within our inner ear, and our brain resolves these waves into some semblance of order and intelligibility. This order would be the “image” of sound. Thus also for smell, taste, and touch.
Nietzsche’s second metaphor occurs when “[t]he image is then imitated by a sound” (767). This is the creation of language. The nervous receptors of the original stimuli transfer the image data to our verbal centers, which create a verbal representation of the image.
An interesting aspect of this process of language creation as described by Nietzsche is the necessary break between each step in the process. Translating nervous stimulus into image, and then image into sound, the human brain must encounter some very difficult choices. An analogy might be found in the difficulty translators have in capturing the essence of a passage in another language. Some data will be lost. Some amount of meaning will be distorted. Indeed, many hold that translation even between languages is impossible to accomplish effectively. And this between systems of thought designed to accomplish the same or similar tasks (i.e., the verbal representation of real experiences, of Nietzsche’s “nervous stimulation”). Nietzsche puts the difficulty thus: “...[E]ach time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (767). As humans, we tend to gloss over the difficulty that occurs when one type of stimulus is translated into an entirely different sort of data (by way of not one, as Nietzsche points out, but two leaps) so long as this translation is as familiar as that which accompanies language formation. We are more uncomfortable with other forms of the same phenomenon; for example, the experience of tasting colors, which has been attested to by many who have experienced LSD, seems entirely foreign to us. Perhaps a closer examination of such “nonstandard” data translations would help us become aware of just how much of reality is lost in translation.
Nietzsche goes on to discuss “concepts” as the uses of language for individual cases which “must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases” (767). He gives the example of “leaf” and “honesty”, which words do not designate a particular entity in reality, but only a generalized concept of reality which is “formed by dropping...individual differences arbitrarily” (767). Nietzsche asserts that, by way of these generalizations, we create for ourselves a concept of something which does not exist in nature, a prototypical leaf from which all other leaves are designed in our minds. It’s interesting to note that this generalization necessarily begins in (and may take place entirely within) the creation of the first metaphor. When our nerves in our eyes are stimulated by some photons, our translation of this data into image must necessarily draw on the image data already stored in our brains. It is a simplification, to be sure, but it seems as though this sense data may be compared with the experiences of past nervous sensation, and when an alignment is found (between this sensation and others which are associated with the image-concept of ‘leaf’) a generalizing concept is applied. Language, then--the second metaphor--has less work to do.
Nietzsche uses this classification of experience in order to call into question humanity's relationship with the concept of “truth,” which he calls
A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding... (768)
He (somewhat humorously) returns to the liar with which he began the discussion, stating that humanity's obligation to “truth” is no more than “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all” (768). This construct of humanity, which he acknowledges as “a mighty architectural genius,” nevertheless has no real connection to the world as it is, to Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and Nietzsche calls on man to again awaken to the knowledge of himself “as an artistically creative subject,” though this awakening necessarily means the loss of such “degree of peace, security, and consistency” as is achieved within the dream-image of constructed reality (770).
Nietzsche explains that humanity's continued employment of specific images to relate to specific neural activity, over many generations, has created in our minds a sense of causality, “as if it were the only necessary image” (770). He likens this experience to a dream from which one never wakes, and so takes the dream itself to be reality. The idea of dream-image is intimately taken up by Benjamin, whose phantasmagoria suggests that we are continually caught up in a false understanding of the continuity of reality. Benjamin, too, points to language's tendency to dissolve the concept of flux which is inherent in any concept of reality which attempts to exclude human consciousness. Things as they are do not have continuity, and only in the employment of language do I become an entity which is independent and unchanging.
By calling into question humanity’s access to universal truth, Nietzsche anticipates Postmodern relativism. It’s funny: it seems like I have, for most of my life, been aware of language’s limitations as Nietzsche outlines them, and I am attracted to his theory as foundational partially because it strikes me as somewhat odd that the concept of language’s constructedness could have ever been “new.” My feeling must necessarily stem from my own embeddedness in a set of cultural assumptions which has begun to internalize Nietzsche’s theory. This brings up a certain double paradox of the theory. First of all (and rather plainly), by making his claim that language does not relate to reality, that it distorts truth, Niezsche automatically undercuts his own argument (by virtue of the fact that it, too, is made using language). It’s the philosophical equivalent to saying “nothing I say is true.” But even more paradoxical to me is the idea that Nietzsche’s theory is embedded in a history of philosophy that makes him the inheritor of a great deal of ground work regarding our capacity for reason. It would seem, in other words, that Nietzsche’s own theory denouncing reason could only be reached through a superior employment of reason. Only through a superior self-consciousness can man become conscious of his own self-consciousness.
Nietzsche distinguishes between the man of concepts, regularity and reason, and the man of pretense, myth and immediacy. Modern, enlightened man, he says, will “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions,” but must rather “generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colorful concepts in order to harness the vehicle” of his life to them (768). Nietzsche blames science, which “works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts” for removing humanity into a world of metaphors based on metaphors, and so distancing us even further from any sense of reality. The drive to form metaphors, which Nietzsche acknowledges as a “fundamental human drive,” is not realized in a world structured by science, which hands down its own prepackaged metaphors and gives them the name Truth. This drive, however, might still be realized “in myth and in art generally” (771-72). He turns to pre-Socratic Greek society for an example of man for whom, “thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth...anything is possible at any time, as it is in a dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods” (772). Modern man rarely considers just how much of his life and society functions based on the assumptions that trees will not talk and things, when dropped, will fall to the ground. By calling to mind a people for whom these assumptions did not hold, for whom at best trees usually didn’t talk, Nietzsche challenges us not to start looking for talking trees, but to recognize our position within the construct so that we might realize our own embeddedness in Nature (and thus, perhaps, gain perspective on ourselves as a species). He doesn’t seem to call so much for a total subversion of reason, but for a re-evaluation of reason in relation to its opposite: intuition.
Nietzsche’s hope for art and intuition as a force for revealing new metaphors, for subverting the normative framework of “reality” presented by science and reason, calls to mind Shelley’s assertion that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (From A Defence of Poetry, excerpted in my Norton, p. 596). When Nietzsche’s artist, his “man of intuition[,]...wields his weapons more mightily” than the man of reason, “a culture can take shape...and the rule of art over life can become established” bringing humanity “a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release” (773). Unlike Schiller or Coleridge, who set the imaginative capacity of man over and against natural phenomenon, Nietzsche suggests that our imaginative capacity, our metaphor-drive, is most active when we are closest to nature. When we allow ourselves to abandon the distinction that reason creates between “man” and “nature”, we are most attuned to the magical possibilities that the mysteries of nature present.
Nietzsche is interested in reembedding man in the great family tree of the animal kingdom. He seems to say to humanity, “Get over yourself. You are just a big dumb animal who has distinguished yourself from all other animals only because you happen to be a little less dumb.” He sets his task at the beginning of the essay, when he claims that what is needed is
...a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; where were eternities during which it did not exist; and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life. (764)
Nietzsche characterizes human intellect as nothing more than a Darwinian evolutionary tactic for “dissimulation”--for trickery, deceit, and cleverness--made necessary by our lack of “horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (765). From a scientific standpoint, this is probably a relatively accurate (if vastly oversimplified) portrayal. Again, Nietzsche himself must have seen the irony of the situation: His own theories about man’s over-reliance on Science are made possible and given “teeth” (so to speak) only through the advancement of Science. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which deems to delineate all of life into an historical organizing apparatus, must represent for him a supreme example of Science’s propensity for the columbarium, and yet it is only Darwin’s theory which finally, and irrevocably, repositions mankind as nothing more than one possible outcome of a complicated natural phenomenon.
In describing man’s propensity for constructing metaphorical relationships, Nietzsche finds analogies in some of the more complex constructions found in nature (e.g., cobwebs, honeycombs). These analogies give rise to the question, how much of humanity’s “web” of metaphors results from our embeddedness in nature? Nietzsche would have us believe that our metaphorical tendencies, piling metaphor upon metaphor and building an “infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations...on flowing water” are in many ways subverting our natural tendency, dividing us from intuition and mystery (769). However, as he himself admits, “if we could communicate with a midge we would hear that it too floats through the air with the...feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world” (764). This seems to suggest that the tendency to center the universe around oneself is a natural tendency, which implies that a rejection of the constructed concept--a rejection in large part called for by Nietzsche--would represent more of a domination of man’s reason over nature than the original construction itself. Though it is our nature that we construct metaphors to dominate nature, Nietzsche seems to say, now we must begin the process of dominating (by abandoning) our natural tendencies to do so.
I am supremely interested in the limitations of language put forward by Nietzsche. I have been intrigued by the futility of the phrase, “do you know what I mean?” for some time, and I am excited to see where his theories lead. However, it seems essential to recognize Nietzsche’s suspicion of human intellect as an essentially intellectual suspicion, as well as to remember that, when all’s said and done, we are still left with language and action as our only recourse as unifying and organizing social forces.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Schiller's Dialectic
Schiller's interest in the Artist as a uniter of those things local and contemporary with those things universal and eternal seems intimately related to Hegel's own dialectic. Schiller positions his ideal in the past, with Ancient Greek civilization, but acknowledges that "the intellect was unavoidably compelled by the store of knowledge it already possessed to dissociate itself from feeling and intuition in an attempt to arrive at exact discursive understanding" (488). He traces this split in our psyche to the many fractures which are evident to him in modern society - between "State and Church, laws and customs," and perhaps most importantly between the Individual and Whole (486-7). It would seem then that the dissociation between reason and intellect creates a dialectic which is potentially resolved in the Artist, who can forge anew in the work of Art "the Ideal out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary" (491).
In considering this similarity, what does it suggest that Schiller's first term - Greek art and culture - becomes Hegel's second?
Schiller also seems to remain confident that Art can eventually reconcile the two. Hegel's dialectic suggests that Art reaches its synthesis in its recognition that the two cannot be perfectly reconciled.
In considering this similarity, what does it suggest that Schiller's first term - Greek art and culture - becomes Hegel's second?
Schiller also seems to remain confident that Art can eventually reconcile the two. Hegel's dialectic suggests that Art reaches its synthesis in its recognition that the two cannot be perfectly reconciled.
Hegel's Artistic Progress
In his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel extends his concept of the dialectic into the realm of art and the Artist. He begins with the questions, "What is art?" and "Where does art come from?" and delineates two flawed conceptions, finally settling on a third.
Initially, he suggests that since a work of art is "a product of human activity," it might be something that can be "known and expounded, and learnt and pursued by others" (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 547). Hegel has an interest in rejecting this view because it does not take into account what he considers the spiritual nature of the artwork:
Rejecting this view because what is spiritual in art, cannot be taught through formal rules (i.e., "spiritual activity...is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the minds eye a quite other and richer content" (548)), Hegel suggests the opposite scenario. That is, perhaps the work of art is "a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit" which "is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift" (548). This, too, he finds limited in its applicability:
We can certainly see Hegel's point with a little imagination. Suppose that Michelangelo had had never worked under Giovanni, or that Mozart's father had not been a music teacher. While there is surely something to be said for each of these artist's talent and genius (both far exceeded their teachers in ability), it is hard to imagine either of them getting started without some formal training.
Hegel's use of the word "handicraft" to describe an aspect of high art is telling. He understood, as I and others have suggested, the relationship between the artist and the material world. There is something to Art that is no more than labor, and while he does place importance on inborn (i.e., Natural) talent, he states quite clearly that "Skill in technique is not helped by any inspiration, but only by reflection, industry, and practice" (549).
And so we can see the dialectical synthesis: Art cannot be produced either through gross manipulation of material, nor through pure spiritual abstraction, but must combine elements of both. The manipulation of the object is tempered by the spirit, and likewise the spirit is informed by the artists skillful (i.e., practiced, formal) manipulation of the object.
It must be admitted that Hegel's interest in locating the Spirit in the work of art and Artist is a priori. One might ask him, "how can you tell?" That is, I could likely hire a counterfeit artist to paint an exact replica of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. If the copy is good enough, and I secretly hung it in place of the original, it is unlikely that anyone would suddenly realize the difference: "This painting looks the same but lacks the artist's Spirit!" Indeed, art forgeries are widespread, and forgers find success specifically through the strict implementation of Hegel's first proposition (his thesis, if you will), that art can be created entirely formally. And Kant's aesthetic judgment suggests that this formalism is all that is required for beauty. Certainly we can't perceive the artist's Spirit when we behold in the painting its perposiveness without purpose. However, Hegel's concept of art seems tied specifically to his interest in locating the sources and implications of human self-consciousness, an idea which he ties directly to the Spirit. He suggests as much in his discussion of a third question: "Why is Art Necessary?" The need for art, he says,
Hegel has little interest in Art for the viewer, for the critic (Kantian or otherwise) who would judge a work of art. For him, art is essential to man in its capacity to help him gain self-consciousness.
It almost sounds here, as was implied or guessed at in his Master-Slave Dialectic, that Hegel's artist is, necessarily, in the position of the Slave. He states as much when he discusses the artistic imperative. "[M]an brings himself before himself by practical activity," he says, "since he has the impulse...[to alter] external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics" (550). Compare this to his claim, in Phenomenology of Spirit, that "through work...the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is" (546).
After expound the dialectic of Art on an individual, one might say psychical, level, Hegel puts forward a historical understanding of Art. He proposes that Art has moved through three historical phases. In symbolic art (which is for Hegel represented by the early art of the pantheistic East), the concept of the Idea remains entirely detached from the object, which is only taken, in its more or less natural form, to symbolize the idea. In totemic art, for example, the animal representation is a simple externalizing of the self-conscious Idea onto what amounts to a 'found object.' This results, Hegel claims, from the symbolic artist's inability to shape and determine his own Spiritual Idea, and his realization of the continued incompatibility results in the sublime:
In classical art, on the other hand, the form of the Idea is found in representations of the human body. Hegel considers that this is a step in the right direction, because in representing the external form as that of a human, the Artist has located the external form which most corresponds to the Idea:
Hegel finds classical art deficient in its necessity of finding the Spiritual form in a concrete human form. By doing so, he seems to say, classical art attempts to overcome the gap between the Idea and reality. This is ultimately fruitless, however:
Hegel's Spirit is far to vast to be contained within a particular human form, and by placing the expression of it within a human, classical art limits the spirit to those manifestations of it that are particularly human. The solution to this problem presents itself in Hegel's third (and final) category of art: the romantic. Romantic art becomes possible because man becomes aware of the relationship between his physical form and the world of Spirit. Classical art implies this relationship, but, as Hegel points out:
What started out, in symbolic art, as a mere recognition of the Spirit in the natural world (a recognition which brought about the sublime, which must necessarily be seen as quite fearful and uncomfortable) became an embodiment of the Spirit in human form for classical art. (Classical art, it would seem, grew out out an attempt to do away with the fearfulness of the sublime.) Finally, with the self-conscious recognition of the essential divide between form and Spirit, Romantic art achieves a synthesis. Romantic art is essentially meta-artistic, continually pointing, as it must, to the impossibility of a perfect expression of the Spirit in physical form. Hegel says as much: "romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself" (555).
The implication here is that 'art is over.' That art has risen, in Romanticism, to as high a degree of understanding as is possible, as Hegel suggests, may be true, but this truth may simply be a symptom of how he defines art and how he defines Romanticism. Because he defines Romanticism as the self-conscious interaction between man's consciousness and his environment, it might even be said that much of art that was created before the Romantic era is essentially Romantic art. Is not Shakespeare's exploration of the limitations of stage productions in showing reality, as well has his opposite insistence that "all the world" is indeed "a stage," a manifestation of the same meta-artistic tendencies that Hegel requires of his romantic artist? It might be argued further that man's understanding of himself at the time of Hegel's writing seems equally as "classical" to us as his classical artists did to him. It strikes me that what he defines as a completion might simply be another step in humankind's ongoing process of self-actualization and expression.
Initially, he suggests that since a work of art is "a product of human activity," it might be something that can be "known and expounded, and learnt and pursued by others" (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 547). Hegel has an interest in rejecting this view because it does not take into account what he considers the spiritual nature of the artwork:
...what can be carried out on such directions can only be something formally regular and mechanical. For the mechanical alone is of so external a kind that only a purely empty exercise of will and dexterity is required... (547)
Rejecting this view because what is spiritual in art, cannot be taught through formal rules (i.e., "spiritual activity...is bound to work from its own resources and bring before the minds eye a quite other and richer content" (548)), Hegel suggests the opposite scenario. That is, perhaps the work of art is "a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit" which "is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift" (548). This, too, he finds limited in its applicability:
...even if the talent and genius of the artist has in it a natural element, yet this element essentially requires development by thought, reflection on the mode of its productivity, and practice and skill in producing. For...the work of art has a purely technical side which extends into handicraft...(548)
We can certainly see Hegel's point with a little imagination. Suppose that Michelangelo had had never worked under Giovanni, or that Mozart's father had not been a music teacher. While there is surely something to be said for each of these artist's talent and genius (both far exceeded their teachers in ability), it is hard to imagine either of them getting started without some formal training.
Hegel's use of the word "handicraft" to describe an aspect of high art is telling. He understood, as I and others have suggested, the relationship between the artist and the material world. There is something to Art that is no more than labor, and while he does place importance on inborn (i.e., Natural) talent, he states quite clearly that "Skill in technique is not helped by any inspiration, but only by reflection, industry, and practice" (549).
And so we can see the dialectical synthesis: Art cannot be produced either through gross manipulation of material, nor through pure spiritual abstraction, but must combine elements of both. The manipulation of the object is tempered by the spirit, and likewise the spirit is informed by the artists skillful (i.e., practiced, formal) manipulation of the object.
It must be admitted that Hegel's interest in locating the Spirit in the work of art and Artist is a priori. One might ask him, "how can you tell?" That is, I could likely hire a counterfeit artist to paint an exact replica of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. If the copy is good enough, and I secretly hung it in place of the original, it is unlikely that anyone would suddenly realize the difference: "This painting looks the same but lacks the artist's Spirit!" Indeed, art forgeries are widespread, and forgers find success specifically through the strict implementation of Hegel's first proposition (his thesis, if you will), that art can be created entirely formally. And Kant's aesthetic judgment suggests that this formalism is all that is required for beauty. Certainly we can't perceive the artist's Spirit when we behold in the painting its perposiveness without purpose. However, Hegel's concept of art seems tied specifically to his interest in locating the sources and implications of human self-consciousness, an idea which he ties directly to the Spirit. He suggests as much in his discussion of a third question: "Why is Art Necessary?" The need for art, he says,
has its origins in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is...The universal need for art, that is to say, is man's rational need to life the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self (550-51).
Hegel has little interest in Art for the viewer, for the critic (Kantian or otherwise) who would judge a work of art. For him, art is essential to man in its capacity to help him gain self-consciousness.
It almost sounds here, as was implied or guessed at in his Master-Slave Dialectic, that Hegel's artist is, necessarily, in the position of the Slave. He states as much when he discusses the artistic imperative. "[M]an brings himself before himself by practical activity," he says, "since he has the impulse...[to alter] external things whereon he impresses the seal of his inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics" (550). Compare this to his claim, in Phenomenology of Spirit, that "through work...the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is" (546).
After expound the dialectic of Art on an individual, one might say psychical, level, Hegel puts forward a historical understanding of Art. He proposes that Art has moved through three historical phases. In symbolic art (which is for Hegel represented by the early art of the pantheistic East), the concept of the Idea remains entirely detached from the object, which is only taken, in its more or less natural form, to symbolize the idea. In totemic art, for example, the animal representation is a simple externalizing of the self-conscious Idea onto what amounts to a 'found object.' This results, Hegel claims, from the symbolic artist's inability to shape and determine his own Spiritual Idea, and his realization of the continued incompatibility results in the sublime:
...the Idea, as something inward, is itself unsatisfied by such externality, and...it persists sublime above all this multiplicity of shapes which do not correspond with it (552).
In classical art, on the other hand, the form of the Idea is found in representations of the human body. Hegel considers that this is a step in the right direction, because in representing the external form as that of a human, the Artist has located the external form which most corresponds to the Idea:
...in so far as art's task is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get involved in this anthropomorphism, since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying way only in its body (553).
Hegel finds classical art deficient in its necessity of finding the Spiritual form in a concrete human form. By doing so, he seems to say, classical art attempts to overcome the gap between the Idea and reality. This is ultimately fruitless, however:
...if the correspondence of meaning and shape is to be perfect, the spirutality, which is the content, must be of such a kind that it can express itself completely int he natural human form...Therefore here the spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal...(553)
Hegel's Spirit is far to vast to be contained within a particular human form, and by placing the expression of it within a human, classical art limits the spirit to those manifestations of it that are particularly human. The solution to this problem presents itself in Hegel's third (and final) category of art: the romantic. Romantic art becomes possible because man becomes aware of the relationship between his physical form and the world of Spirit. Classical art implies this relationship, but, as Hegel points out:
...this elevation of the implicit into self-conscious knowledge introduces a tremendous difference...the unity of divine and human nature, is raised from an immediate to a known unity, the true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instate the inwardness of self-consciousness (554).
What started out, in symbolic art, as a mere recognition of the Spirit in the natural world (a recognition which brought about the sublime, which must necessarily be seen as quite fearful and uncomfortable) became an embodiment of the Spirit in human form for classical art. (Classical art, it would seem, grew out out an attempt to do away with the fearfulness of the sublime.) Finally, with the self-conscious recognition of the essential divide between form and Spirit, Romantic art achieves a synthesis. Romantic art is essentially meta-artistic, continually pointing, as it must, to the impossibility of a perfect expression of the Spirit in physical form. Hegel says as much: "romantic art is the self-transcendence of art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself" (555).
The implication here is that 'art is over.' That art has risen, in Romanticism, to as high a degree of understanding as is possible, as Hegel suggests, may be true, but this truth may simply be a symptom of how he defines art and how he defines Romanticism. Because he defines Romanticism as the self-conscious interaction between man's consciousness and his environment, it might even be said that much of art that was created before the Romantic era is essentially Romantic art. Is not Shakespeare's exploration of the limitations of stage productions in showing reality, as well has his opposite insistence that "all the world" is indeed "a stage," a manifestation of the same meta-artistic tendencies that Hegel requires of his romantic artist? It might be argued further that man's understanding of himself at the time of Hegel's writing seems equally as "classical" to us as his classical artists did to him. It strikes me that what he defines as a completion might simply be another step in humankind's ongoing process of self-actualization and expression.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Lyrics, (Mis)Heard
In a previous post, I mentioned the experience of mishearing lyrics, only later to have them corrected. At the time, I was not able to come up with an example of my own, nor did I receive much help from Beth.
Since, though, I was reminded of the song "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. This is not my favorite song, but I enjoy it when I hear it (any distaste I have for it springs from overplay -- a phenomenon I call the "'Cats In the Cradle' Effect"). Until recently, however, whenever I heard it, I would sing along to the chorus, "Yes, save the dance."
Obviously, I didn't even know the title of the song, which again is an interesting instantiation of the exact type of atextual interaction that my previous post was attempting to explore. I could have discovered the song's title by doing a little research, for sure, but I didn't really care that much.
Corporate-run radio stations have largely done away with mentioning the names of the songs that they play. This might signal "we all should know," and it might even encourage outside research for those listeners who are interested in being "inside" whatever loose association comprises any specific radio station's listenership. But it seems more likely a sign of a general agreement that "if you don't know, it doesn't really matter." Enjoyment of music is not (necessarily) predicated on an identity with the musician, any more than enjoyment of a book is (again, necessarily) linked with some personal association with the author. Further, as is obvious from the above example, neither is music (as literature) enjoyed primarily through a personal connection with the lyrics as written.
People will take issue with this last assertion, and produce examples of song lyrics that touch the soul, or hold so much meaning for them. I am not attempting to say that lyrics don't matter. I would go so far as to suggest that the lyrics are a major part of what makes modern music so important as cultural product. I am only arguing that, insofar as lyrics do create impact - whether emotionally or socially or politically - they do so largely "as heard" rather than "as written."
My experience with "The Safety Dance" is appropriate to illuminate at least part of this idea. If I had any interest in listening to the song closely, I would probably have noticed that the first lyrics of the song actually spell out the title. My experiences were instead visceral, bobbing my head and drumming the steering wheel and singing "Yes, save the dance."
I learned the correct lyrics, and thus the title of the song, only when it was re-released as part of a Glee compilation that Beth bought. The reason I find this example so compelling is that learning the correct lyrics didn't actually illuminate anything about the song. In fact, the new idea of a "Safety Dance" further mystified what was for me was a relatively straightforward dance song. With my original chorus, the song is about "leav[ing] your friends behind" and dancing in spite of those who might nay-say or poo-poo. Because "your friends don't dance" it is presumable that they would prefer you not either, and my original chorus suggests that it is these friends from whom the dance must be "saved."
But a "Safety Dance?" A "Safety Dance" would make sense in the context of further lyrics which described how to do it. Might I suggest,
But in the actual song it seemed to point in the direction of some unknown content, some assumed understanding of which I was obviously ill-informed. I was suddenly an outsider.
Regarding the actual meaning, Wikipedia says:
So there you have it. I am struck by the distance between the song's original contextual intent (as propounded by its performer) and its relevance to me as a contemporary listener in the utterly decontextualized environment of corporate-run radio. And yet, even with the lyrics misheard, I was easily able to enjoy the song.
I'm curious as to the possibility that it was just such a mishearing which allowed my easy incorporation of song. I am also interested in the way the song creates meaning for Beth, who now associates it directly with a certain fictional situation from Glee which has close to nothing in common with the original context. But that's for another day. Here, let me just give you this:
Pick your favorite anachronism.
Since, though, I was reminded of the song "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. This is not my favorite song, but I enjoy it when I hear it (any distaste I have for it springs from overplay -- a phenomenon I call the "'Cats In the Cradle' Effect"). Until recently, however, whenever I heard it, I would sing along to the chorus, "Yes, save the dance."
Obviously, I didn't even know the title of the song, which again is an interesting instantiation of the exact type of atextual interaction that my previous post was attempting to explore. I could have discovered the song's title by doing a little research, for sure, but I didn't really care that much.
Corporate-run radio stations have largely done away with mentioning the names of the songs that they play. This might signal "we all should know," and it might even encourage outside research for those listeners who are interested in being "inside" whatever loose association comprises any specific radio station's listenership. But it seems more likely a sign of a general agreement that "if you don't know, it doesn't really matter." Enjoyment of music is not (necessarily) predicated on an identity with the musician, any more than enjoyment of a book is (again, necessarily) linked with some personal association with the author. Further, as is obvious from the above example, neither is music (as literature) enjoyed primarily through a personal connection with the lyrics as written.
People will take issue with this last assertion, and produce examples of song lyrics that touch the soul, or hold so much meaning for them. I am not attempting to say that lyrics don't matter. I would go so far as to suggest that the lyrics are a major part of what makes modern music so important as cultural product. I am only arguing that, insofar as lyrics do create impact - whether emotionally or socially or politically - they do so largely "as heard" rather than "as written."
My experience with "The Safety Dance" is appropriate to illuminate at least part of this idea. If I had any interest in listening to the song closely, I would probably have noticed that the first lyrics of the song actually spell out the title. My experiences were instead visceral, bobbing my head and drumming the steering wheel and singing "Yes, save the dance."
I learned the correct lyrics, and thus the title of the song, only when it was re-released as part of a Glee compilation that Beth bought. The reason I find this example so compelling is that learning the correct lyrics didn't actually illuminate anything about the song. In fact, the new idea of a "Safety Dance" further mystified what was for me was a relatively straightforward dance song. With my original chorus, the song is about "leav[ing] your friends behind" and dancing in spite of those who might nay-say or poo-poo. Because "your friends don't dance" it is presumable that they would prefer you not either, and my original chorus suggests that it is these friends from whom the dance must be "saved."
But a "Safety Dance?" A "Safety Dance" would make sense in the context of further lyrics which described how to do it. Might I suggest,
Put your hand out front and all say "stop!"
Blow that whistle, wave 'em through like a cop.
But in the actual song it seemed to point in the direction of some unknown content, some assumed understanding of which I was obviously ill-informed. I was suddenly an outsider.
Regarding the actual meaning, Wikipedia says:
The writer/performer, Ivan Doroschuk, has explained that "The Safety Dance" is a protest against bouncers stopping dancers pogoing to 1980s New Wave music in clubs when Disco was dying and New Wave was up and coming. New Wave dancing, especially pogoing, was different from Disco dancing, because it was done individually instead of with partners and involved holding the torso rigid and thrashing about. To uninformed bystanders this could look dangerous, especially if pogoers accidentally bounced into one another (the more deliberately violent evolution of pogoing is slam dancing). The bouncers didn't like pogoing so they would tell pogoers to stop or be kicked out of the club.
So there you have it. I am struck by the distance between the song's original contextual intent (as propounded by its performer) and its relevance to me as a contemporary listener in the utterly decontextualized environment of corporate-run radio. And yet, even with the lyrics misheard, I was easily able to enjoy the song.
I'm curious as to the possibility that it was just such a mishearing which allowed my easy incorporation of song. I am also interested in the way the song creates meaning for Beth, who now associates it directly with a certain fictional situation from Glee which has close to nothing in common with the original context. But that's for another day. Here, let me just give you this:
Pick your favorite anachronism.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Dialectical Intentionality
It might be productive to pursue a dialectical approach to the impasse we have reached in our discussions of Shakespearean intentionality in performance: a desire to know the author's intentions, an unconscious assumption that we do, exists along with a thriving self-consciousness that we really have no idea of the author's intentions, and the (mysterious?) drive to interpret the plays at any rate.
This is the same impasse which is reached and "overcome" by Hegel, a resolution of the relationship between humans and their environment. In the study of Shakespeare's plays, this deadlock manifests itself in the self-conceptualization of an other both in Shakespeare himself and in the culture he inhabited. (Re)Extending our understanding of Shakespeare into the realm of pure performance serves to highlight this basic antagonism because in performance we reflect our exploration of otherness backward on ourselves. The question of how one goes about recreating a performance of Shakespeare seems to make clear in its implications that anyone interacting with Shakespeare, regardless of the medium, is really doing just that. Thus, the performance suggests a great deal about our own culture -- our immediate, rather than historical, relationship to our environment -- that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is an awakening in a Benjaminian sense, a realization of our own implication in the world.
Shakespeare himself occupied a space in relation to print and performance --both professionally and culturally -- very near the one that any self-respecting director or actor (or critic!) must occupy in his or her attempt to put on a Shakespearean performance. For Shakespeare, it was the proximal nature of text, it's sudden pervasiveness and cultural import that transformed his ideas about performance. He operated for much of his career both as performer, in that the "primary audience" of his plays continued to be a live one, and as author, increasingly aware of the role his works played as literature. In a wider sense, Shakespeare's culture was embroiled in a political and economic transformation which had as its center, it's organizing force, the printed word (Essential McLuhan, 1995, p. 97, 108-109). Shakespeare's plays, more or less consciously, embody this dialectical moment and act as a synthesis for the opposing forces of print and oral traditions.
For the director or critic acting today, this dialectic works in reverse, and Shakespeare's social struggle becomes an artistic one; the struggle with text as a medium takes shape as an object in the playscript itself, and the oral tradition to which Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance hearken back is projected forward in the current performance and impels us to reflect on our own cultural manifestations.
In order to pursue such a theoretical analysis, many other equally valid and important interpretations of Shakespeare's works must be either marginalized or ignored completely. However, examining Shakespeare in this way seems especially useful; Shakespeare's commentary on performance as such, and on textual materials related to performance, may well give new insight into the ways that other approaches (theoretical, thematic, or pragmatic) might best proceed.
Shakespeare himself explores through his plays the experience of waking up to one's position in history. In his mythological themes he reminds his audience of a past that never was, a relationship with an ideal that he places in history, while insisting through his structure and dialogue that his audience place it in their minds. The mythological elements his plays are the most direct and unambiguous references to the recent oral past that can be found in Shakespeare. Additionally, through the metadramatic and metatextual structures that pervade his plays, he continually calls attention to his plays as plays, as cultural artifacts both in their nature as performance, and in their ever-increasing nature as print. By doing so he not only challenges his audience members to recognize the role that performance plays in their own lives and cultural histories; he also outlines the role that performance will play in the burgeoning age of print.
This is the effect achieved by the Chorus in Henry V, as well as by its self-conscious placement at the end of a series of historical plays based on historical books. The Chorus's invocation of the muse in the first line of the play, when paired with the subject matter that the title suggests, serves to begin the play in precisely the ambiguous position between the oral and written traditions that Shakespeare and his audiences were experiencing in the world all around them. And the Chorus of Henry V is pervasive, entering the story line over and over ostensibly in order to "set the scene." The very frequency of these interruptions, however, serves automatically to draw the audience away from the story, away from the illusion, and remind them of their role as interpreters not of reality, not of history per se, but of a creative construct.
Likewise, Henry V seems repeatedly to make direct and indirect reference both to the plays which preceded it. The most obvious reference to 1 and 2 Henry IV is in the structure of the scenes involving Falstaff. Falstaff, of course, does not appear on stage in the play, but to understand his role at all, Shakespeare's reason for even mentioning him, requires a knowledge of his historical existence within the Henriad. This knowledge may well have been cultivated in the audience by the mere existence in performance-past of the preceding plays, but it seems more likely that Shakespeare found he could rely somewhat on the printed dispersal of his plays to fill in the gaps for potential late-comers. (My Oxford Shakespeare gives the date that Henry V was written as Spring 1599, with a first printed edition available by August of the next year. One year to print, even by today's standards, is exceedingly fast.) This is not to say that the actual reading of Shakespeare was necessarily widespread (although it may have been), but only to suggest that quickly printed editions of Shakespeare's plays allowed for a wider familiarity with their characters, stories and themes. An appropriate analogy might be found in the "Last-time-on" segments which begin many television shows, or the Seasonal "recap" episodes of shows like Lost. It's not necessarily important that you know every detail, but that what is important you can glean quickly and so be prepared. Falstaff's death, and Harry's role in Bardolph's execution, not to mention the numerous passing references to Harry's delinquent past, only take on their full meaning if you know what happened in the first three episodes.
The dialogue of the play is also stricken through with references to the previous plays, as well as to their historical source material. In the first scene of the play, while Canterbury expounds Harry's qualifications, he says "list his discourse of war, and you shall hear/A fearful battle rendered you in music" (1.1.44-45), which would seem to be a reminder, right at the outset, that a lot of this story has already been told. And both Canterbury and Fluellen mention history as received by a "chronicle," the former in reference to history yet created (1.2.16), the latter to discuss a history long since past (4.7.92). In both instances the audience is being reminded of the material, the literal Chronicles (according to Wells and Taylor, this includes both those of Hall and Holinshed), with which they are certainly familiar and from which the story of the play is drawn. King Harry himself calls attention to his own position as the character in someone else's creative construct:
That Harry refuses the possibility that it is his death that will be immortalized speaks to his role as a mythological hero. However, by recognizing "history" --that is, written history, in the form of "chronicles" and of plays -- as the immortalizing medium, Shakespeare again calls attention to the increasing importance of print to contemporary society.
A Midsummer Nights Dream seems built entirely around bringing about a conscious understanding in the audience of the interaction between theme and dramatic structure. In its obsession with the idea of Dreams that stretches all the way to the title, it almost demands that an awakening is necessary. He equates dream reality both to dramatic reality, but through some very clever and complicated structural choices, he succeeds in extending the idea of dream-world out into the world itself, in to the world of the audience. His utilization of mythological themes and characters reminds the audience of its oral history, but he implements these characters in such a way that oral (that is to say, episodic) history ends up muddying and being muddied by written (linear, narrative, reason-bound) history. It cannot be coincidence, for example, that Shakespeare locates his dream-world naysayer, his unremitting voice of reason, in the character of Theseus. Theseus, whose own history is entirely mythic, has been tamed by reason and refuses to allow the realm of the myth into his kingdom. Theseus's very decision to marry, to "settle down", the even which frames the entire play, suggests just the sort of transition that Elizabethan culture was experiencing with the growth of print-culture.
Perhaps Shakespeare recognized his cultural and historical position and meant to exploit it. More likely, much of his seeming preoccupation is a result simply of his unconscious position in history. Either way, performance as intention becomes a salient element of any attempt at analysis, and especially analysis with the intention of performance.
This is the same impasse which is reached and "overcome" by Hegel, a resolution of the relationship between humans and their environment. In the study of Shakespeare's plays, this deadlock manifests itself in the self-conceptualization of an other both in Shakespeare himself and in the culture he inhabited. (Re)Extending our understanding of Shakespeare into the realm of pure performance serves to highlight this basic antagonism because in performance we reflect our exploration of otherness backward on ourselves. The question of how one goes about recreating a performance of Shakespeare seems to make clear in its implications that anyone interacting with Shakespeare, regardless of the medium, is really doing just that. Thus, the performance suggests a great deal about our own culture -- our immediate, rather than historical, relationship to our environment -- that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is an awakening in a Benjaminian sense, a realization of our own implication in the world.
Shakespeare himself occupied a space in relation to print and performance --both professionally and culturally -- very near the one that any self-respecting director or actor (or critic!) must occupy in his or her attempt to put on a Shakespearean performance. For Shakespeare, it was the proximal nature of text, it's sudden pervasiveness and cultural import that transformed his ideas about performance. He operated for much of his career both as performer, in that the "primary audience" of his plays continued to be a live one, and as author, increasingly aware of the role his works played as literature. In a wider sense, Shakespeare's culture was embroiled in a political and economic transformation which had as its center, it's organizing force, the printed word (Essential McLuhan, 1995, p. 97, 108-109). Shakespeare's plays, more or less consciously, embody this dialectical moment and act as a synthesis for the opposing forces of print and oral traditions.
For the director or critic acting today, this dialectic works in reverse, and Shakespeare's social struggle becomes an artistic one; the struggle with text as a medium takes shape as an object in the playscript itself, and the oral tradition to which Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance hearken back is projected forward in the current performance and impels us to reflect on our own cultural manifestations.
In order to pursue such a theoretical analysis, many other equally valid and important interpretations of Shakespeare's works must be either marginalized or ignored completely. However, examining Shakespeare in this way seems especially useful; Shakespeare's commentary on performance as such, and on textual materials related to performance, may well give new insight into the ways that other approaches (theoretical, thematic, or pragmatic) might best proceed.
Shakespeare himself explores through his plays the experience of waking up to one's position in history. In his mythological themes he reminds his audience of a past that never was, a relationship with an ideal that he places in history, while insisting through his structure and dialogue that his audience place it in their minds. The mythological elements his plays are the most direct and unambiguous references to the recent oral past that can be found in Shakespeare. Additionally, through the metadramatic and metatextual structures that pervade his plays, he continually calls attention to his plays as plays, as cultural artifacts both in their nature as performance, and in their ever-increasing nature as print. By doing so he not only challenges his audience members to recognize the role that performance plays in their own lives and cultural histories; he also outlines the role that performance will play in the burgeoning age of print.
This is the effect achieved by the Chorus in Henry V, as well as by its self-conscious placement at the end of a series of historical plays based on historical books. The Chorus's invocation of the muse in the first line of the play, when paired with the subject matter that the title suggests, serves to begin the play in precisely the ambiguous position between the oral and written traditions that Shakespeare and his audiences were experiencing in the world all around them. And the Chorus of Henry V is pervasive, entering the story line over and over ostensibly in order to "set the scene." The very frequency of these interruptions, however, serves automatically to draw the audience away from the story, away from the illusion, and remind them of their role as interpreters not of reality, not of history per se, but of a creative construct.
Likewise, Henry V seems repeatedly to make direct and indirect reference both to the plays which preceded it. The most obvious reference to 1 and 2 Henry IV is in the structure of the scenes involving Falstaff. Falstaff, of course, does not appear on stage in the play, but to understand his role at all, Shakespeare's reason for even mentioning him, requires a knowledge of his historical existence within the Henriad. This knowledge may well have been cultivated in the audience by the mere existence in performance-past of the preceding plays, but it seems more likely that Shakespeare found he could rely somewhat on the printed dispersal of his plays to fill in the gaps for potential late-comers. (My Oxford Shakespeare gives the date that Henry V was written as Spring 1599, with a first printed edition available by August of the next year. One year to print, even by today's standards, is exceedingly fast.) This is not to say that the actual reading of Shakespeare was necessarily widespread (although it may have been), but only to suggest that quickly printed editions of Shakespeare's plays allowed for a wider familiarity with their characters, stories and themes. An appropriate analogy might be found in the "Last-time-on" segments which begin many television shows, or the Seasonal "recap" episodes of shows like Lost. It's not necessarily important that you know every detail, but that what is important you can glean quickly and so be prepared. Falstaff's death, and Harry's role in Bardolph's execution, not to mention the numerous passing references to Harry's delinquent past, only take on their full meaning if you know what happened in the first three episodes.
The dialogue of the play is also stricken through with references to the previous plays, as well as to their historical source material. In the first scene of the play, while Canterbury expounds Harry's qualifications, he says "list his discourse of war, and you shall hear/A fearful battle rendered you in music" (1.1.44-45), which would seem to be a reminder, right at the outset, that a lot of this story has already been told. And both Canterbury and Fluellen mention history as received by a "chronicle," the former in reference to history yet created (1.2.16), the latter to discuss a history long since past (4.7.92). In both instances the audience is being reminded of the material, the literal Chronicles (according to Wells and Taylor, this includes both those of Hall and Holinshed), with which they are certainly familiar and from which the story of the play is drawn. King Harry himself calls attention to his own position as the character in someone else's creative construct:
Either our history shall with full mouth
Speak freely of our acts, or else our grave,
Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worshipped with a waxen epitaph (1.2.230-33).
That Harry refuses the possibility that it is his death that will be immortalized speaks to his role as a mythological hero. However, by recognizing "history" --that is, written history, in the form of "chronicles" and of plays -- as the immortalizing medium, Shakespeare again calls attention to the increasing importance of print to contemporary society.
A Midsummer Nights Dream seems built entirely around bringing about a conscious understanding in the audience of the interaction between theme and dramatic structure. In its obsession with the idea of Dreams that stretches all the way to the title, it almost demands that an awakening is necessary. He equates dream reality both to dramatic reality, but through some very clever and complicated structural choices, he succeeds in extending the idea of dream-world out into the world itself, in to the world of the audience. His utilization of mythological themes and characters reminds the audience of its oral history, but he implements these characters in such a way that oral (that is to say, episodic) history ends up muddying and being muddied by written (linear, narrative, reason-bound) history. It cannot be coincidence, for example, that Shakespeare locates his dream-world naysayer, his unremitting voice of reason, in the character of Theseus. Theseus, whose own history is entirely mythic, has been tamed by reason and refuses to allow the realm of the myth into his kingdom. Theseus's very decision to marry, to "settle down", the even which frames the entire play, suggests just the sort of transition that Elizabethan culture was experiencing with the growth of print-culture.
Perhaps Shakespeare recognized his cultural and historical position and meant to exploit it. More likely, much of his seeming preoccupation is a result simply of his unconscious position in history. Either way, performance as intention becomes a salient element of any attempt at analysis, and especially analysis with the intention of performance.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Kant and Schiller on "The Pirate Bay"
Kant says of Taste:
Schiller insists in On the Aesthetic Education of Man:
It'd be nice to have these guys on your side when you got nailed for pirating music. They could help you explain to Ke$ha that to demand remuneration for her work was to deny its appreciation as true art.
Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, p. 418).
Schiller insists in On the Aesthetic Education of Man:
Let [the Artist] direct his gaze upwards, to the dignity of his calling and the universal Law, not downwards towards Fortune and the needs of daily life (491).
It'd be nice to have these guys on your side when you got nailed for pirating music. They could help you explain to Ke$ha that to demand remuneration for her work was to deny its appreciation as true art.
Hegelian Dialectic: The Master and the Slave
Hegel's interest in the dialectic lies in his attempt to codify the process by which human's come to self-consciousness, to an understanding of themselves. Thus, he begins his Master-Slave Dialectic with the assertion that "Self-consciousness exists...only in being acknowledged," and the twisting path which leads us all to a recognition of this fact is what comprises the rest of the passage (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 541). My chief goal in this post is to attempt an untangling of the relationship that Hegel describes.
He presents us with a self-consciousness. Hegel's self-consciousness is a negatively defined entity. That is, self-consciousness is "simple being-for self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'...it is an individual. (542). Hegelian self-consciousness defines itself by excluding everything 'other' than itself. This self must be very Kantian in nature, taking no interest in the material world, and existing in a state of pure reason. It is an appeal to the pure "Spirit" of the being. (Because Hegel thus puts it, and because it might help understanding the interaction that must take place, I will henceforth place myself, my 'I' in this role)
Suddenly, I am faced by an other (presumably another human being like me), and because the other is obviously another self-consciousness, I am faced with a host of difficulties. It seems like some of these difficulties arise because, as the editors of the excerpt suggest, "selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly" (538). I am disposed to think of myself as an independent identity, existing eternally, but the confrontation of another self, and the realization through that experience that this other self must feel the same way that I do about its independence and identity, I feel that my independence, and thus my identity (my self-consciousness, at least so far as I have developed it up to this point) is threatened. Hegel suggests that my first reaction, when faced with this threat, is to supersede the other:
However, by attempting to supersede the other, which I recognize as independent - a veritable mirror of my own self-consciousness - I realize that I myself have also been superseded, both in my attempt to position myself above the other, and in understanding that the other is invariably doing to me just what I have done to him. Hegel addresses the double nature of this interaction, which makes it essentially different than the interaction I might have with other objects:
This back and forth between denial-of-other and denial-of-self goes on until I am faced with a realization: if I am to preserve my self as independent and eternal, I must destroy this other.
(I must say, though I think I sorta' get this, it doesn't come out much clearer from my pen then it did from Hegel's. Ever thus...)
Hegel's "life-and-death struggle" heightens the interplay between the two self-consciousnesses to the highest degree. What began as mere "supersession" becomes destruction. However, the paradoxes inherent in the first situation have not diminished. By seeking the death of the other, I necessarily put my own life on the line, and by recognizing the opportunity to kill the other, I necessarily recognize my own inherent killability. Hegel says, rather cryptically, that "it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won" (543). It is in this moment of staking my life that I realize "that there is nothing present in [me] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment" (543). Essentially, it seems that by staking my own life on my perceived self-consciousness, I necessarily recognize that my idea of an eternal self independent of external factors is a flawed conception. I begin to realize that my only consciousness is one "entangled in a variety of relationships" (543).
If the battle ends in death, by the same paradox that Hegel has been following, it ends in the death (quite literally) of the other self-consciousness, and the death also (though implicit) of my own. However, Hegel suggests that this battle might end otherwise: in a relationship he considers as Master (Herr, which Norton translates as "lord") and Slave (Knecht, translated here as "bondsman").
A note: I have been using myself as the subject of this interaction, supposing as the 'other' another human being like me, and until the moment that he introduces Lord and Bondsman, it seems as though Hegel, too, considers this an interaction between two separate human beings. However, this does not necessarily hold true hereafter. Look at the way Hegel leads up to the idea:
Suddenly it seems as though Hegel has moved inside the mind of one of his individuals, in order to discover a split which has occurred within the self-consciousness (within me), rather than between it and another. It's as if the dialectal struggle between self and other (which culminated in a life-or-death struggle) is synthesized in an understanding of self as self and other. Suddenly, the 'I' that at first comprised my entire self-consciousness - built as it was on my understanding of being-for-self, now comprises a single dialectical aspect of my self-consciousness; the other aspect is understood as being-for-another.
So the Master-Slave dialectic, which for Hegel is the ultimate struggle, is perhaps one that takes place within my own mind. I preserve my sense of self-consciousness as being-for-self (that Kantian Ideal of mind free from all interest in the world, negatively defined as only that which is not external to me) by supplicating the second self-consciousness (the being-for-another) to the role of Slave. The former takes the role of Master, and mediates its interaction with the world of things through the latter.
Of course the Master finds his role to be empty, for the reason that he is now necessarily determining his own self-consciousness in relation to a self-consciousness in the Slave that, while he may have dominion over it [the Slave], loses its being-for-self precisely because he has dominion over it: It is now a thing, a being-for-another, and because the Master can only measure himself in relation to the Slave, he finds himself to be lacking as well. Hegel says, "What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He [the Master] is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself" (545). (It strikes me that while the Master sees his complete dissociation from the world of things as an ultimate goal, this dissociation necessarily sends him wheeling into disconnectedness. Either he has nothing to measure his self-consciousness by but itself [which induces a circularity], or he must measure it by something self-consciously inferior).
The Slave, on the other hand, has a golden opportunity. Remember that it, too, faced its death and so understands itself as a vanishing moment:
Hegel seems to suggest that through their dialectical relationship the Master is naturally diminished and the Slave is naturally empowered. How this comes to a dialectical synthesis, however, in which the opposition itself is superseded, is not clear. (Perhaps because it hasn't?)
Taken this way (as a manifestation of inner conflict), the Master-Slave Dialectic presents us with a self at odds with itself, a consciousness at once dominant and submissive. The delineation of the Slave suggests that our interactions with objects, with the external environment, is at once somehow barbaric and redemptive. It also paints a picture of our higher faculty (what I might characterize as our sense of reason) as both domineering and distant.
There is also the possibility of taking the Master-Slave Dialectic as an external conflict, between two individuals (or even two groups of individuals). It seems, in this case, that the Master's crisis, his recognition of the Slave, and thus himself, as something less than being-for-self, might result in the sort of moral imperative that has ended slavery in the past. There comes a point when the Master "stops fooling himself" and recognizes in the Slave another independent self-consciousness. I'm not sure, however, what necessitates this shift, except to point to historical examples as proof that it happens. It seems like it might be just as easy for the Master, who has reduced the Slave to just another object, might achieve the same level of self-consciousness through his manipulation of the Slave as the Slave receives through his manipulation of other objects.
As Nausheen Eusuf pointed out in our class discussion, one might take the Slave's interaction with the world as analogous to that of the Artist, realizing his self-consciousness in the work he does on the material world:
Nausheen positions the Artist Slave in relationship to the Master that is the weight of artistic tradition, but I wonder if the Master couldn't equally well be positioned within a Kantian critical art community. That is, perhaps the Master which the Artist Slave works under is the Ideal of artistic aesthetic, certainly bound to a great degree by ideas of beauty that have been handed down, but ultimately determined by a critical 'disinterest' in Kant's sense.
It is telling that this Masterly critical viewpoint is rather empty. Kant's aesthetic judgment needs necessarily hold no interest in the object, and the effects of this, as I have explored them previously, seem to align with the ultimate self-conscious dissatisfaction that the Master experiences by distancing himself from the world of objects.
One of the beauties of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic is its ambiguity. Finally, I don't feel like I've fully come to grips with Hegel's concept of self-consciousness, nor with the implications that his Master-Slave dialect suggests, and I don't (wholly) blame Hegel's confusing and difficult language. In a certain sense it feels deliberately left unfinished. What, after all, is the use of a theory that answers all the questions?
He presents us with a self-consciousness. Hegel's self-consciousness is a negatively defined entity. That is, self-consciousness is "simple being-for self, self-equal through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and absolute object is 'I'...it is an individual. (542). Hegelian self-consciousness defines itself by excluding everything 'other' than itself. This self must be very Kantian in nature, taking no interest in the material world, and existing in a state of pure reason. It is an appeal to the pure "Spirit" of the being. (Because Hegel thus puts it, and because it might help understanding the interaction that must take place, I will henceforth place myself, my 'I' in this role)
Suddenly, I am faced by an other (presumably another human being like me), and because the other is obviously another self-consciousness, I am faced with a host of difficulties. It seems like some of these difficulties arise because, as the editors of the excerpt suggest, "selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly" (538). I am disposed to think of myself as an independent identity, existing eternally, but the confrontation of another self, and the realization through that experience that this other self must feel the same way that I do about its independence and identity, I feel that my independence, and thus my identity (my self-consciousness, at least so far as I have developed it up to this point) is threatened. Hegel suggests that my first reaction, when faced with this threat, is to supersede the other:
[I] must supersede this...other independent being in order thereby to become certain of [myself] as the essential being. (541)
However, by attempting to supersede the other, which I recognize as independent - a veritable mirror of my own self-consciousness - I realize that I myself have also been superseded, both in my attempt to position myself above the other, and in understanding that the other is invariably doing to me just what I have done to him. Hegel addresses the double nature of this interaction, which makes it essentially different than the interaction I might have with other objects:
[I do] not have the object before [me] merely as it exists primarily for desire [as perhaps other objects in the world might exist], but as something that has an independent existence of its own, which, therefore, [I] cannot utilize for [my] own purposes, if that object [the other self-consciousness] does not of its own accord do what the first does to [me] (542).
This back and forth between denial-of-other and denial-of-self goes on until I am faced with a realization: if I am to preserve my self as independent and eternal, I must destroy this other.
(I must say, though I think I sorta' get this, it doesn't come out much clearer from my pen then it did from Hegel's. Ever thus...)
Hegel's "life-and-death struggle" heightens the interplay between the two self-consciousnesses to the highest degree. What began as mere "supersession" becomes destruction. However, the paradoxes inherent in the first situation have not diminished. By seeking the death of the other, I necessarily put my own life on the line, and by recognizing the opportunity to kill the other, I necessarily recognize my own inherent killability. Hegel says, rather cryptically, that "it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won" (543). It is in this moment of staking my life that I realize "that there is nothing present in [me] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment" (543). Essentially, it seems that by staking my own life on my perceived self-consciousness, I necessarily recognize that my idea of an eternal self independent of external factors is a flawed conception. I begin to realize that my only consciousness is one "entangled in a variety of relationships" (543).
If the battle ends in death, by the same paradox that Hegel has been following, it ends in the death (quite literally) of the other self-consciousness, and the death also (though implicit) of my own. However, Hegel suggests that this battle might end otherwise: in a relationship he considers as Master (Herr, which Norton translates as "lord") and Slave (Knecht, translated here as "bondsman").
A note: I have been using myself as the subject of this interaction, supposing as the 'other' another human being like me, and until the moment that he introduces Lord and Bondsman, it seems as though Hegel, too, considers this an interaction between two separate human beings. However, this does not necessarily hold true hereafter. Look at the way Hegel leads up to the idea:
In the immediate self-consciousness the simple 'I' is the absolute object which, however, for us or in itself is absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment lasting independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience [of the life-and-death struggle?]; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord [Herr], the other is bondsman [Knecht] (544).
Suddenly it seems as though Hegel has moved inside the mind of one of his individuals, in order to discover a split which has occurred within the self-consciousness (within me), rather than between it and another. It's as if the dialectal struggle between self and other (which culminated in a life-or-death struggle) is synthesized in an understanding of self as self and other. Suddenly, the 'I' that at first comprised my entire self-consciousness - built as it was on my understanding of being-for-self, now comprises a single dialectical aspect of my self-consciousness; the other aspect is understood as being-for-another.
So the Master-Slave dialectic, which for Hegel is the ultimate struggle, is perhaps one that takes place within my own mind. I preserve my sense of self-consciousness as being-for-self (that Kantian Ideal of mind free from all interest in the world, negatively defined as only that which is not external to me) by supplicating the second self-consciousness (the being-for-another) to the role of Slave. The former takes the role of Master, and mediates its interaction with the world of things through the latter.
Of course the Master finds his role to be empty, for the reason that he is now necessarily determining his own self-consciousness in relation to a self-consciousness in the Slave that, while he may have dominion over it [the Slave], loses its being-for-self precisely because he has dominion over it: It is now a thing, a being-for-another, and because the Master can only measure himself in relation to the Slave, he finds himself to be lacking as well. Hegel says, "What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He [the Master] is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself" (545). (It strikes me that while the Master sees his complete dissociation from the world of things as an ultimate goal, this dissociation necessarily sends him wheeling into disconnectedness. Either he has nothing to measure his self-consciousness by but itself [which induces a circularity], or he must measure it by something self-consciously inferior).
The Slave, on the other hand, has a golden opportunity. Remember that it, too, faced its death and so understands itself as a vanishing moment:
In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness (546).The Slave is not conscious of this capacity within itself, but, Hegel maintains, can become conscious of it through the work the Slave does on things:
...work forms and shapes the thing...the formative activity is at the same time individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence (546).So through the act of creating, of working on the natural world, the Slave becomes conscious of himself as other than the natural world (i.e., he can set himself up once again as a negatively-defined self-consciousness). In what he makes, he sees the permanence that is then reflected back onto himself. Does that make sense? (I'm afraid not.)
Hegel seems to suggest that through their dialectical relationship the Master is naturally diminished and the Slave is naturally empowered. How this comes to a dialectical synthesis, however, in which the opposition itself is superseded, is not clear. (Perhaps because it hasn't?)
Taken this way (as a manifestation of inner conflict), the Master-Slave Dialectic presents us with a self at odds with itself, a consciousness at once dominant and submissive. The delineation of the Slave suggests that our interactions with objects, with the external environment, is at once somehow barbaric and redemptive. It also paints a picture of our higher faculty (what I might characterize as our sense of reason) as both domineering and distant.
There is also the possibility of taking the Master-Slave Dialectic as an external conflict, between two individuals (or even two groups of individuals). It seems, in this case, that the Master's crisis, his recognition of the Slave, and thus himself, as something less than being-for-self, might result in the sort of moral imperative that has ended slavery in the past. There comes a point when the Master "stops fooling himself" and recognizes in the Slave another independent self-consciousness. I'm not sure, however, what necessitates this shift, except to point to historical examples as proof that it happens. It seems like it might be just as easy for the Master, who has reduced the Slave to just another object, might achieve the same level of self-consciousness through his manipulation of the Slave as the Slave receives through his manipulation of other objects.
As Nausheen Eusuf pointed out in our class discussion, one might take the Slave's interaction with the world as analogous to that of the Artist, realizing his self-consciousness in the work he does on the material world:
The bondsman labors to fashion the world of objects and imprint upon it the mark of his own subjectivity, through which he gradually gains self-definition and authority. SImilarly, the young writer labors to fashion language into shapes that are uniquely his, and as he finds language bending to his will, he gains confidence through the permanence of his art. (Eusuf, Nausheen. From lecture notes entitled "Hegel, Consciousness, Creativity." 3 Sept. 2010)
Nausheen positions the Artist Slave in relationship to the Master that is the weight of artistic tradition, but I wonder if the Master couldn't equally well be positioned within a Kantian critical art community. That is, perhaps the Master which the Artist Slave works under is the Ideal of artistic aesthetic, certainly bound to a great degree by ideas of beauty that have been handed down, but ultimately determined by a critical 'disinterest' in Kant's sense.
It is telling that this Masterly critical viewpoint is rather empty. Kant's aesthetic judgment needs necessarily hold no interest in the object, and the effects of this, as I have explored them previously, seem to align with the ultimate self-conscious dissatisfaction that the Master experiences by distancing himself from the world of objects.
One of the beauties of Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic is its ambiguity. Finally, I don't feel like I've fully come to grips with Hegel's concept of self-consciousness, nor with the implications that his Master-Slave dialect suggests, and I don't (wholly) blame Hegel's confusing and difficult language. In a certain sense it feels deliberately left unfinished. What, after all, is the use of a theory that answers all the questions?
Schiller's Aesthetic Education
I recently took issue with Kant for insisting that an aesthetic education was possible, while entirely avoiding any actual explanation of such an education. I have found, in Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man (excepted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), an attempt to describe just such a curriculum. It occurs in his Ninth Letter, after an explanation of his conviction that Art is the "instrument not provided by the State" which might "open up living springs" of moral justice even from under the heaviest corruption (490). The fourth paragraph he begins thus:
Here Schiller seems to create the vision of the Artist as Outcast that strikes me as so key to the Romantic poets and the Romantic hero alike. Schiller's Artist takes "his theme" from his own time, so it would follow that the more invested he is in understanding and internalizing the experience of his own time the more clearly he will express his theme. But "his form he will borrow from a nobler time, nay, from beyond time altogether, from the absolute, unchanging unity of his being" (490). The Artist for Schiller is necessarily political, necessarily moral, as he is charged with the task, "Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good" (491).
There is something of DFW in this concept of the Artist. Wallace was so invested in the mainstream ideas of socio-normative behavior, inhabited them so fully and naturally, and yet, was continuously is reminded (and constantly reminding) of his (and our) essential isolation, alienation, disunity.
Finally, Schiller even suggests that the formal aspects of the art object are necessarily and appropriately determined by historical context:
This acknowledgment of taste as historically and culturally determined is notably absent in Kant, who is so determined toward universality and eternality that he glosses the issue of the Artist altogether.
The artist is indeed the child of his age; but woe to him if he is at the same time its ward or, worse still, its minion! Let some beneficent deity snatch the sucking betimes from his mother's breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and suffer him to come to maturity under a distanct Grecian sky. The, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger, to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, terrible like Agamemnon's son, to cleanse and to purify it. (490)
Here Schiller seems to create the vision of the Artist as Outcast that strikes me as so key to the Romantic poets and the Romantic hero alike. Schiller's Artist takes "his theme" from his own time, so it would follow that the more invested he is in understanding and internalizing the experience of his own time the more clearly he will express his theme. But "his form he will borrow from a nobler time, nay, from beyond time altogether, from the absolute, unchanging unity of his being" (490). The Artist for Schiller is necessarily political, necessarily moral, as he is charged with the task, "Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good" (491).
There is something of DFW in this concept of the Artist. Wallace was so invested in the mainstream ideas of socio-normative behavior, inhabited them so fully and naturally, and yet, was continuously is reminded (and constantly reminding) of his (and our) essential isolation, alienation, disunity.
Finally, Schiller even suggests that the formal aspects of the art object are necessarily and appropriately determined by historical context:
...nothing is more common than for both, science as well as art, to pay homage to the spirit of the age, or for creative minds to accept the critical standards of prevailing taste (490).
This acknowledgment of taste as historically and culturally determined is notably absent in Kant, who is so determined toward universality and eternality that he glosses the issue of the Artist altogether.
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