Literary Term of the Day: Autotelic, or "Art for Art's Sake" · 11:02pm Oct 20th, 2022
Blog Number 200: "Vanity of Vanities, All is Vanity!" Edition
Do we use art, or does art use us? Or could it be... both?
And how crazy can this get, exactly?
Should warn ahead of time: while this post contains some official talk about literary topics, I do work towards a pet hypothesis near the end that's - even to my own ears - borderline bonkers at best. It would therefore be misleading for me to not point this out before we get there, so that readers can better see it for the speculation it is, and therefore form their own judgements clearly.
Also:
THIS IS A BIG POST! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
To make navigation a mite easier, here's a quick contents section before we hit the meat of the matter:
CONTENTS
"Autotelic" Defined
Do You Drive Stick or Auto?
-
A Book Without a Reader
Call Me Ism
-
New Criticism
Where I Come From is Not Who I Am
-
The "Intentional Fallacy" Fallacy
A Mind for a Mind, and We'll All Be Dead
-
It's All In The Mind, You Know
Art Lurks Backstage
-
Russian Formalism
The Familiar Becomes the Unfamiliar
-
The Work of Art VS Art Itself
I Invent Poetic Functions, Mostly
-
Symbiotic Bacteria
Life as Lived Under the Stairs
-
Autotelic Life
Art Has No Function Other Than Being Itself
-
Art Imitates Life
The Art of Infection, and the Infectious Art
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Articles of Particles of Art
One is a Community, and the Community is One
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Self-Purpose Means... Self-Purpose Ends
OK, here we go...
"Autotelic" Defined
Do You Drive Stick or Auto?
First, I'll talk about the term itself, then hopefully it'll be clear what I'm getting at.
From auto- "self" and -telos "end", you can probably guess the term's meaning in literary circles, but let me quote the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Third Edition, as official confirmation that I'm pretentious as all get-out:
autotelic
Having, as an artistic work, no end or purpose beyond its own existence. The term was used by T. S. Eliot in 1923 and adopted by *New Criticism to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from *didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works that involve practical reference to things outside themselves: in the words of the American poet Archibald MacLeish, 'A poem should not mean ǀ But be'. A similar idea is implied in the theory of the 'poetic function' put forward in *Russian Formalism.
In other words, anything autotelic is not there "for" anything: other things are there "for" it.
"Ask not what your tree can do for you - ask what you can do for your tree."
Despite my own title, I should point out that "Art for Art's Sake" is technically an independent stance, dating from the 19th century, which owes more to the Aestheticism movement in France (hence why it's often rendered as the French equivalent l'art pour l'art) than, say, to the 20th-century New Criticism in America.
On that tangential note, the original Aestheticism movement sought to prioritize the beauty of art in its own right. This was as opposed to recruiting it for other purposes such as "moral, didactic, or *political purposes". More specifically, Aestheticism was a descendant of Romanticism and a reaction against the then-popular "*philistine bourgeois values of practical efficiency and morality".
Expect to see a lot of "isms" here, by the way: schools of artistic thought come and go like fossils in geological strata.
"Mom, Dad, look! I found the unsettling bones of reductionism! It went extinct ages ago!"
"No dear, that one's still around."
Getting back to Aestheticism and "Art for Art's Sake", that's why lower-case "aestheticism" (possibly a descendant?) is any general philosophy that sees beauty as an end in itself, not as a means to some other end. And "aesthetics" broadly is a philosophical question about the nature of beauty.
Either way, the general idea is the same. Art is autotelic. Art is an end in itself.
Which I find a really fascinating stance, because - depending on how you read it - it can vary from crashingly obvious to obviously wrong. Let me explain, as this might get a bit... philosophical.
A Book Without a Reader
Call Me Ism
Wrapped up in all this is the question of purpose. What is X for? Is it for X itself? Is it a means to serve something else (let's call that Y)? Is it in service of Y which, in turn, is in service of Z? What?
On one level, I find the idea of autotelic art strange, and I'm willing to guess you might too. Take a work of art... say, any copy of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. What is it? A book.
Imagine all of humanity has vanished. Maybe life has been extinguished in some complete apocalypse. There's a desert. In the desert, there's a book lying on a sand dune. The same book, Moby-Dick. But what is it without humans around?
"Oh my gosh. If a tree falls over in the woods when nopony's around to hear it... then who's gonna make a book out of it!?"
Physically, a block of pulped paper with precise ink marks on various internal layers, plus some glue and binding to stop it disintegrating when someone picks it up. In purpose terms, it might as well be a block of wood. So obviously has it no life of its own, no mind of its own, no thoughts, no feelings, no behaviour, no intentions or drives, no purpose... The idea of it having a "sake", a purpose in life, is basically as nonsensical as announcing "Rocks for Rocks' Sake".
So step back a bit. Let's return humans to the picture.
The block of pulped paper is still a block: how often have you seen someone's bookshelf and seen titles that have never been read? Picked up? Even dusted? Until it's opened, it's basically a blah ornament - whether through careless neglect or a straight-up refusal to read it - so at most there's a kind of mental aura around it. Maybe the person who bought it just wanted to impress someone, or had a vague intention to read it. But you could get the same effect by buying a block of wood and then cleverly concealing it with a cover for disguise. It'll achieve the same effect, but the contents are void and (directly, at least) meaningless.
Ah, but now we get to the interesting part. Someone reads it.
Or, to put it another way, someone tears open this nondescript block of pulped paper and sees the precise patterns of ink marks on each internal layer. Finally, the secrets are revealed! A sense of engagement awaits! The real magic can begin!
There's just one problem: the reader is French.
"There is no known cure."
Again, the pages are an ornament, but anything deeper might as well not exist. It is meaningless.
So our French reader sends it to a penpal in... say, New York... as a gift, and our American reader opens Moby-Dick for the first time (and presumably has a guide or appendix available to help with the fact that languages change a bit over time - the original book was published in 1851, after all). Our American reader looks at ink squiggles on paper, and sees Captain Ahab.
Even if you want to argue that Captain Ahab was based on at least one real, historical figure (if you're curious...), the Ahab in the book did not and perhaps could not exist. There's no specific Ahab out in the world as a convenient reference point. The brain of our American reader knows this, at least on some level, and yet it conjures up a man anyway, smelling of sea salt, with mad red eyes and a harpoon (or whatever a harpoon looks like to an American who might never have seen one) held tightly in his hand as he watches the waves for the flash of white flesh.
I don't want to belabour an obvious point, but I do want to make sure we keep it in mind for the rest of the blog. While the physical properties of art help human imaginations (the precise shapes of the ink marks would be wholly different for our French reader as for our American one, for example), without humanity, art is simply physical matter. It's all in the mind, you know. So, in a sense, "Art for Art's Sake" - autotelic art - is an impossibility, because art's manifestations of purpose are ultimately inseparable from the purposes of human beings.
Besides, knowing what something isn't can often be a helpful clue for figuring out what it is.
"That's no white whale!"
"Ah, kill it anyway. We'll paint it white and stick a fluke on its tail."
New Criticism
Where I Come From is Not Who I Am
The next discussion point - having narrowed art's "purpose" down to what's going on in human minds - is to ask what it's actually doing there.
This is where the aforementioned New Criticism and Russian Formalism schools of literary thought become extremely interesting to me. As far as I understand it, New Criticism - which arose during the middle of the 20th century, likely coined by John Crowe Ransom in 1941 via his book of the same title - was more concerned with "the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context", and put more emphasis on the text itself than on the context in which that text arose. Hence why its critics tended to focus on its neglect of that context, such as the historical.
🎵 "Gal, you don't know the rap
Till you know the grand-pap." 🎵
On one level, I kinda see what this is getting at. There's a parallel in logic called the "genetic fallacy", and the gist of it is that you can't discredit (or, technically, credit) an argument based on who made it or where it came from: the argument should stand or fall independently, on its own merits. Meaning you still have to do the legwork of checking what it says is true, checking each link in the chain is valid, checking it doesn't fall foul of any alternative conclusions, and so on. Its historic context or whatever is strictly irrelevant.
The same goes for how a literary text comes across, and indeed the New Critic duo of W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley - co-writing an essay in 1946 - coined a fallacy in their title to describe just such a process: "The Intentional Fallacy". Basically, whatever the author's intentions or "purpose", it is not the only or even the main criterion by which the meaning of a text can be judged. Once it's released from an author's control, the text has its own independent, arguably "objective" existence, and readers are at liberty to interpret it however they see it.
"Get your own book! It's mine! I'm gonna interpret the *^$! out of this thing!"
(By the way, "death of the author" sounds like it's the same thing, but I should point out one thing: that term was actually coined in France roughly 22 years later by Roland Barthes, who was writing in a different academic context, so odds are this was a case of two different schools of thought hitting upon the same conclusion independently, as there's no evidence Barthes was aware of the New Criticism term).
Or, to put it in D. H. Lawrence's words: "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale."
New Criticism also deserves credit for similar ideas such as the "affective fallacy", which is the (in their view, erroneous) assumption that the main purpose of a work was to arouse the reader's emotions. To put it another way, if you said the purpose of a tearjerker was to make people cry, or the purpose of a comedy to make people laugh, a New Critic would argue that this is still a dubious assumption, however widespread it may be (worth noting that New Critics tended not to analyze works in terms of genres).
The "Intentional Fallacy" Fallacy
A Mind for a Mind, and We'll All Be Dead
And... at this point, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to push back against the stance. Yes, an Internet rando has an opinion on an official literary movement, so the odds are I've mucked it up somewhere. But bear with me a sec, because we're ending up in some very odd territory here.
Recall our friend the American reader of Moby-Dick. It's all in the mind, you know.
Fake enough to stall, real enough to hurt.
See, it's one thing to point out a text's meaning doesn't rely exclusively or even mostly on the writer's intentions (or purpose). Charles Dickens wrote a potboiler to keep the money coming in: the result was a Christmas classic. Herman Melville himself wrote Moby-Dick as basically his literary masterpiece: his contemporaries thought it was a dull letdown. And I'm sure you and I have an inordinate fondness and fascination for cartoons that were little more than glorified, recycled adverts in disguise, despite knowing what they were made to be. I could go on. The idea has merit.
It's quite another thing, though, to break down seemingly every possible place where the meaning of a text could reside. And that seems to be where all these fallacies are going with this.
The author wrote a tearjerker to make us cry, but that has no bearing on how we see the text (that's the intentional fallacy). The reader cries, but that has no bearing on what the text's meaning is (the affective fallacy). The reader is delighted by the beauty of the text, but that has no bearing on what the autotelic, "Art for Art's Sake", self-contained text's meaning is. Bit by bit, we get rid of human minds as "fallacies".
No aesthetic value either, because it's not about the purposes of the mind. "Seeking beauty" is a purpose, after all. It's all zeroing in on the text and its "own" meaning. A text that's a block of pulped paper with no mind at all. Where, exactly, do we stop?
And so, by the slippery slope of the nature of such an argument - downplaying or dismissing what was going on in real people's minds at the time - suddenly the art goes back to being a physical object in a post-apocalyptic desert. The autotelic text ends up having no meaning, because there's no one around who could possibly give it any.
So - briefly put - this looks to me like a case of a grain of truth (to its credit, it is getting at something important) in the middle of an absurd sand dune. Art isn't its tools, it and its "purpose" is somehow stuck in people's heads, but it doesn't get its meaning exclusively from one person's head either.
Where do we go from here?
It's All In The Mind, You Know
Art Lurks Backstage
After all that, the important point - maybe an obvious one to you anyway, I don't know - is that no one person has a monopoly on what the purpose of a work of art is. The "intentional fallacy" is still true, in a sense. By the same token, though, there has to be at least one person around to determine what the purpose of a work of art is.
Well, the author is an obvious pick, if only because the author and the audience can be one and the same (something you write which only you will read, for example). But the more people are involved, the more scope there is for each person to bring their own meaning to the table. It gets even weirder if we allow that an author might not even know what they're doing, at least not consciously. It gets weirder and weirder still if we allow that each person in the audience might not even know themselves.
"Am I just a surface? Am I hiding behind it? I'm looking at myself, but where am I?"
But let's not get too bogged-down with the idea of subconscious intentions. It's enough for my purposes that intentions arise somewhere in the mind, regardless of whether or not they can be articulated and defended.
Though it helps things lurking in the mind have someplace to hide...
Russian Formalism
The Familiar Becomes the Unfamiliar
There's an objection to my argument, and it is a fair one. Surely, it's not all in the mind? Surely, a work of art can't be just any old shape and have any old effect? There have to be actual qualities in the work which are doing something too. We might interpret a love poem differently from each other, and we might interpret a pulpy Daring Do adventure story differently from each other too, but only a maniac would say we could switch them willy-nilly and expect the audience to not notice something's off.
This is where the other aforementioned school of thought, the Russian Formalism, enters stage-left.
"Da! Am Pinkamenia Igneousovna Pyov! Is evil trances dance! HUT!"
From what I can tell, this school of thought is older than that of New Criticism by about three decades (founded 1915, apparently). According to my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms - which, if it's not obvious, I'm shamelessly ripping off throughout this ramble to look smart - its main focus was on studying the "literariness" of literary works, or more accurately the "devices" that distinguish it from ordinary language. Basically, works of literature - and, I suppose, works of art more broadly - have (universal or not) devices, mechanisms, processes, or other such tool-like properties by which their "poetic function" can be distinguished. The formalism means that it really doesn't matter what the content is: a stage is a stage is a stage, and they all use props, regardless of whether those props are oversized paper hearts or mock-up Daring Do artefacts.
(This also tied in to their idea of "defamiliarization". I won't go into the elaborate details now, so to put it briefly: literary works, in a sense, deliberately mark themselves out as "other" or outside the "ordinary", in a way to subvert the ordinariness itself. Instead of being a mirror held up to life, defamiliarization makes it clear that this is NOT life, or at least life as we understand it. In a sense, the familiar and the literary are both complete acts, fantasies, strange things - but the literary is fundamentally designed to pull the veil off the familiar things of reality and show them to us afresh. Shklovsky made the point in 1917 with the Russian word ostranenie, which means "making strange".)
"IS STRANGE NOW! DA! NOW WE PARTY 1999-LIKE, COMRADE! BIG PONY IS WATCHING YOU PARTY!"
I don't know if it'll make more sense or less sense if I also say that the Russian Formalists were trying to be more scientific about literary theory than their vague predecessors.
The Work of Art VS Art Itself
I Invent Poetic Functions, Mostly
What I want to get at here - and I admit I might just be seeing what I want to see - is more that idea of "poetic function".
I think we can agree that the shape of a work of art - literary included - does matter, in at least the obvious sense that some writing strategies make more sense for a love poem than for an adventure yarn, or for making readers cry, or for expressing our own inner torment, or whatever/whoever's purpose we have in mind when we go after a book. The form matters, in a similar way to how the chains of a logical argument or the scaffolding of a building matter, but so does the content. All of it, everything, is potentially a device for a function.
To put it another way, "death of the author" makes no more sense to me than "death of the inventor".
Sure, someone could come along and convert a box-standard PC into a personal hacking device, and it makes some sense to point out that the intentions of the maker are beside the point here. Or someone could write a gripping love story, only for most of the audience to see an unsubtle piece of political propaganda, and again, the intentions of the author become logically irrelevant when making sense of that POV. In both cases, in a sense, the "objective", real-world, physical properties of the device do stand on their own and can - at least in principle - be judged independently of either side's POV.
"This one, for example, adopts a strong transdimensional style and is a marvellous example of the revisionary plot device, topped with a fine use of what I shall call balancii betweenus worldius hahawhatisthaticus, and an exquisite and judicious use of a certain howthe*&T%^doesthisevenwork appeal."
But take that line of thought too far, and it's like an organ in a body system: as much as its independent anatomy and physiology is important for understanding what it does in its own right, there's also the not-insignificant matter of what it does holistically, within the system. Take the organ completely out of the body - away from the other living organs - and the first thing you have is a dead organ.
In the end, we come back to: "It's all in the mind, you know!" Not literally, since the work of art on its own does have something important. But even that comes from the mind. And that leads to another, stranger idea of autotelic art.
Symbiotic Bacteria
Life as Lived Under the Stairs
To see what I'm getting at, indulge me a second and ask yourself a dumb question: "Am I all me?"
Answer: "Surprisingly, no."
Pinkie: "I wanna change my answer."
Well, not at the cellular level, at least. Did you know, for a kick-off, that what you call your body contains roughly 37 trillion human cells... and about as many bacterial cells*? Basically, half of your body is not "you". It's not your human cells with your human DNA. It's bacteria.
* (To be fair, precise estimates vary. Some sources put the total number of human cells per body higher: some put it at 50 trillion, for example, and some as high as 100 trillion. Counts of bacterial cells per body also vary. If nothing else, at least this gives you an idea of the sense of scale involved.)
Now, before you panic and rush off to wash your hands, note that nearly all of these are harmless. In fact, their presence is totally normal, even beneficial. Gut bacteria are the obvious examples, and if you've followed a diet (for instance, focusing on fibre), you might have heard of them. In fact, without them, we'd probably up and die.
People often call any attached organism a "parasite", but if so, the term's being used wrong. In ecology, any organisms in close association with each other are traditionally described with the catch-all term "symbionts", engaging in "symbiosis" (sometimes this term is used when it's beneficial, but I prefer the broader version, as there's already a specific term for beneficial ones but no alternative for the broader use).
Some are "exosymbionts": they live outside the body. Some are "endosymbionts": they actually live inside the body.
Some are "facultative": they're not fully committed to the symbiosis and can exist independently if necessary. Some are "obligate": they have to live symbiotically, or they won't survive.
"Parasites" are specifically symbionts who harm their associate. Infectious bacteria like Mycobacterium tuberculosis (guess which disease they cause) are an obvious example, but they don't have to be as dramatically dangerous as that. "Mutualists" are symbionts who benefit each other. Just for completeness' sake, there are also neutral versions: "neutralists" live in association but don't affect each other either way, and a "commensal" is an organism which benefits from an indifferent associate, while an "amensal" is an organism which ends up harmed by its indifferent associate.
And then there's this jerk, who's bad for everybody.
Lastly, I should point out that these categories aren't all black-and-white: an organism that's beneficial in one context might become harmful in another. Some skin bacteria, for instance, take advantage of human wounds and injuries by infecting them, despite being benign passengers the rest of the time.
So you could combine those and get something called - deep breath - a facultative exosymbiont engaged in commensalism. Translation: an organism that can but doesn't have to live on the skin of another, and benefits, while its host doesn't gain or lose either way. Most skin bacteria qualify as such.
Or - another deep breath - an obligate endosymbiont engaged in parasitism. Translation: an organism that has to live inside another one, and benefits, while its host is harmed. Some infectious disease-causing bacteria fit in this category.
Or - final deep breath - well, you get the idea.
Autotelic Life
Art Has No Function Other Than Being Itself
The heck's this got to do with autotelic art, I pretend to hear you ask?
This is where I'm going to sound mad, but hear me out.
The border between madness and genius is very narrow... and about six miles away.
See, the physical manifestations of art - any work of art - are, in a sense, tools with "poetic function". A person - or persons - get(s) an idea or set of ideas. That person - or "a group of people", if you think "persons" sounds dumb - make(s) the art. The art is experienced by that person/group of people and/or other person/group of people sorry if this is sounding like a legal contract I'll try to stop now and they have their idea or set of ideas of what it means.
Compare that with, say, an inventor. I'm not going through the legalese again, so let's keep this simple. Inventor has idea. Inventor makes device. Device is used by someone with own ideas. Replace "inventor" and "device" with "artist" and "artwork", and Bob's your uncle.
Isn't that too mechanistic? Yes, yes it is, but the trick is to distinguish the physical manifestation from the actual art. The manifestation's out there; it's basically an ingenious tool for helping your thoughts. The art is in your mind.
Sadly, it will not give you pyrokinesis.
This is sort of why the intentional fallacy is so valuable, because art interpretation is naturally more flexible and creative than simple tool use, so it helps to remember you can switch back and forth between all the minds involved to make the point. Whatever The Last Supper or The Mona Lisa meant to the original painter, to Leonardo da Vinci, it's independent (in a sense) from whatever each painting means to the next person who looks at it. I'm not going to restrict myself to some idea that an art must be reverse-engineered, or something like that, to have a purpose. The purpose of the work of art doesn't have to depend on the artist's mind. A mind, any mind, will do, so long as it experiences it.
That's why all this talk about autotelic art puts me in mind of living organisms like bacteria (not trying to insult art, by the way: if anything, you could take it as a compliment to the biological beauty of these microscopic marvels). They perform functions, true, but look at it like this: a living thing has no function other than being itself.
Let me repeat that: a living thing has no function other than being itself. A living thing is a perfect example of something that's autotelic.
🎵 "This thing is autotelic... sister-telic... hydro-telic..." 🎵
A bacterium might help digest food or clean up unwanted invaders in the blood (or else it is the unwanted invader), but that's not necessarily what it's "for". As far as the bacterium would be concerned - if they were ever concerned - it's not here "for" anything. It's here to be itself.
Now think of art in the same way. Intriguing, isn't it?
Whether or not you want to jump to the conclusion that art is not just figuratively life-like, but literally is a life-form (personally, I think that's unhelpfully misleading at best), I at least want to make some suggestive - not conclusive - parallels. Both can be "used" by people naturally - for instance, art can be used to teach people things, a "didactic" purpose, and the oldest art dates back tens of thousands of years in cave paintings, suggesting art has long been an integral part of being human.
Both, in a sense, "grow" - from an idea in an artist's head to all kinds of experiences in multiple heads. Both come in all kinds of forms - from "editions" of one text to whole fields of "genres". And both, in a sense, "use" others as "tools" for their own purposes...
"You have such a useful face..."
"...don't you, Cadence?"
OK, this is where I really dig into the madness well. "But Impossible Numbers! Art can't use people! People use art! People have minds of their own! Art doesn't! It's as plain as the nose on your face!"
(Speaking of which: how much do we know about the common nose? The size of the olfactory chambers? The unusually direct link the nerves have to our brain's memory systems? The molecular design of the sensory nerves when the right substance makes contact?)
Art Imitates Life
The Art of Infection, and the Infectious Art
Well, here's my case, such as it is, for the potential idea that art uses us too.
For one thing, the analogy with bacteria - and living things generally - automatically suggests that extra parallel. Bacteria use us just as much as we use them, and they don't need minds to do so. But this is why analogies are lousy arguments: I can't just write up a list of suggestive parallels and then cheekily add one more for the heck of it and shout "Case closed!" Similarity is not identity. Parallels are not proof.
So let me point to something that I think could clarify where I'm coming from.
One of the things I find so bizarre about people's attitude to art is the almost self-sacrificing nature of a lot of artists. There are people who appreciate art, fine, and there are people who devote a lot of time and money to it as connoisseurs and devotees, fine. It's when people are quite willing to go above and beyond for the sake of art that it kind of bewilders me.
"I just wanted the shiny thiiiiiiiiing!"
Maybe it's just the pragmatist in me, but I always look at people, who - say - are quite prepared to risk poverty, commit crimes, sell blood, or just do other apparently self-damaging things, all out of what seems to be an unhealthy obsession with completing this one work of art or fulfilling this one dream of a masterpiece or experiencing some kind of incomprehensible artistic buzz. No matter how enthusiastic I'd get about, say, a great writer or a play that touched me deeply, there's always that piece of my brain that says, "Well, yes, but I wouldn't risk life and limb for it. If it's a choice between saving a burning gallery and keeping a cool head, just bring me a hot drink and I'll at least make sad noises at the ashes."
Art's not unique in drawing out this self-sacrificing, vaguely noble impulse, of course. Humans will throw themselves on the fire for all sorts of things, and I'm not suggesting they're wrong to do so. But there is at least a need to explain it.
From a biological perspective, it's insane. Lots of organisms protect their children, of course, and some form alliances so strong that harming one is as good as harming the other: in those situations, it makes sense to take risks to protect a significant other. What you won't see are organisms throwing themselves on the fire for what's basically a tool, or even a work of art. The tool serves them, not the other way around. Cold as it is, it's a ruthlessly pragmatic attitude that ensures survival and reproduction. Self-sacrifice is just a fast track to extinction. Logically: as with tools, so with art.
"NOOO! MOM TOLD ME I NEVER SHOULD HAVE TAKEN UP THE DAAARRRK AAARRRTS! AAARRRGH!"
Unless, of course, the "art" is still alive somewhere when you're done. The "art" survives in your stead. The "art" grows to reach other minds.
By this, I don't mean art spreads like some kind of uniform gas, which is already a bunch of identical molecules that happen to need more room. I mean it has to simultaneously hop from human to human while simultaneously leaving itself in the original human, even though at the beginning there wasn't a cloud of them: just one for one human. Hence there's probably a reason we naturally reach for words straight from the epidemiological dictionary when we talk about a "spread" of ideas, though it's just as obvious it's not the same thing: bacteria, for instance, have to physically reach other bodies, whereas art and other ideas have to "spread" through proxies.
The "art" has effects of its own - not even conscious ones, for bacteria don't need to be conscious to have effects on their hosts. Perhaps the buzz some people feel when contemplating art is not an accident: it wasn't there before infection, and it becomes a major symptom afterwards. Changes in mood and behaviour are typical of bacterial infection, for one thing. And perhaps among those many minds - some half-hearted, some enthusiastic - there'll arise some other mind so susceptible and so perfectly in tune that it'll prove willing to sacrifice itself for the greater good.
And since a tool, a physical work of art - well-designed as it is for literariness, poetic function, or some other self-justifying purpose - isn't quite the thing itself, then presumably the "art" itself resides within the mind. Hidden, like an obligate endosymbiont.
"I'LL BE BACK! IDEAS NEVER DIE! YOU CAN'T KEEP AWAY FROM ROCK 'N' ROLL FOREVER!"
Some are good, to be fair - there's no reason to suppose mutualism or commensalism or whatnot are off the table. But if it suits their purposes better, maybe some forms of art in the mind become outright parasitic, benefitting themselves but harming their hosts. And look: they already affect a host's mood and behaviour, so why not?
Looked at from that POV, and the self-sacrificing nature of art becomes easy to explain. While humans use art, using it to self-destruction is a very strange idea, even suicidal, from an onlooker's POV (the host probably thinks it's the greatest thing ever).
But if art uses us back, then the destruction of one person goes from a bizarre mystery to a viable strategy, (and something that'd make more sense to an onlooker too). It would be no more mysterious than any other living thing manipulating or killing us to benefit itself: a predator looking for food, a pathogen looking to spread, another human looking to exploit others. Art imitates life, perhaps in more subtle ways than we thought...
In that sense, art isn't (always) used for our sakes. Art would be autotelic. Art would use the world around it for its own ends.
Art... for art's sake?
Articles of Particles of Art
One is a Community, and the Community is One
"Is that it? I was expecting crazier."
OK, so here are some final anticipated counterarguments - which I can't pretend aren't a problem, not least because my pet hypothesis is a shot in the dark. There's still too much we don't know about art, about psychology, about the mind, about all kinds of things social and human.
The first is the argument from single/unique works of art. The second is the argument from rapid change. Both are interrelated, but each has a distinct point of focus.
Firstly, the argument from single/unique works. The problem is that, if we're treating art as a living thing with a purpose of its own, then it falls down when we ask what boundary it has. Especially since the obvious examples immediately disprove it.
One work of art is unique, but uniqueness is fatal to an organism's long-term chances because one of any species will disappear eventually. You need a population. Art ups the stakes further because, if anything, we constantly demand unique works of art.
And then we wonder why this happens.
Constant originality is a virtue in the art world: in the world of biology, it's a quick way to mutate an organism out of existence. Copies in biology are, in a sense, essential to future reproductive success: copies in art are forgeries, or pale imitations of the original, or just a convenient way of getting an artsy-fartsy coaster. They won't be encouraged.
My last-ditch effort to make my argument work is to propose that "art", or even a "work of art", is not actually a monolithic thing in its own right. What we call "art" might be better thought of as a population in its own right of something smaller. "Art particles", to put it crudely, or "articles"?
"So this is what Petunia Paleo was talking about..."
It's... not as desperate as it sounds: we acknowledge that works can have traits in common, themes can transcend individual works, that tropes can be recycled and revisited long after the original expressions have faded from memory. Works are built from smaller elements, to a degree. And that meshes well with the population perspective of art as a whole.
"YES! WE'RE ALL WORKS OF ART!"
"I'm not."
"Shh!"
Think back to the 37 billion cells or so of bacteria making up half the human body. They don't exist as a single mass of "bacteria", or a "work of bacteria", with a united will or purpose: they're the accumulated results of tons and tons of smaller particles living their own individual lives. Some cooperate with each other, some don't mind, some are enemies. Their relationships amongst themselves can be quite complex, and that's before factoring in their relationships with the human host.
Perhaps art works in a similar way. You ever catch yourself thinking that some parts of a work of art serve the whole better than others, or that an artist keeps falling for the same deliberate flaw time and time again? That some works of art seem to be working in perfect inner harmony, whilst others seem to be at war with themselves? You can say that's the result of the artist's struggle to achieve some purpose with the work. Or, or, or you could say that's the result of the struggle amongst the "articles" in the artist's mind. Maybe.
That's a looooot of discord, right enough.
The fatal flaw, as you might have guessed, is that there's not a scrap of evidence that such "articles" exist, so this is a pure ad hoc argument: propping up one empty guess with another empty guess. In which case... there, you have me.
I got nothing. Even if these "articles" were expressed in the brain somehow, I'm not even sure what they'd look like, to be honest. It'd be too silly to look for bacterium-shaped bits of brain matter, let's put it that way.
Which brings me to the second argument: art as a whole changes too rapidly. The difference between this and the last argument is that the last argument asks "If art is a living thing, why don't we see large populations of the same works?", whereas the second argument asks "If art is a living thing, why doesn't it stay the same beast for long?"
Remember all the isms I warned you about? You only have to look at the history of art to realize how profligate schools of literary theory, schools of artistic philosophy, schools of isms and schisms are, how fast they come and go. Bewilderingly so: at best, stability is measured in years. Especially in the age of social media, even the most virulent of infectious diseases (which are usually the viral ones, rather than the bacterial ones, because viruses mutate so much faster than bacteria) look lethargic by comparison.
The Romanticism of the Regency begot the Aestheticism of the Victorian era, which fed into Russian Formalism and fed Eliot's idea of "autotelic", which inspired the New Criticism, which provoked its own critics, and so on. That's not even the only strand of thought. There's dozens of the devils, and it's not always obvious what separates one from the other. And these are schools of thought that unite thinkers from multiple contexts, multiple backgrounds, multiple life stories.
My desperate move here is to suppose that art is like life but much faster. One generation of a human lineage could represent dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of generations in an "art lineage". On the scale of "art", a single human lifespan might be the equivalent of the entire history of civilization after the Ice Age. Imagine how ephemeral empires and revolutions might look if we condensed them all into one human lifetime: the modern civilization at one end would be scarcely recognizable to the early agriculturalists at the other.
"This is modern civilization? Dad gum, but it's changed so much."
"Strange. I hadn't noticed anything different..."
And yet they are all part of a long line of locally stable cultures, changing and merging and turning into each other. To say nothing of how it'd look if we compressed the time between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of humans into the same human lifespan: lineages of stable species must look like flashes in the pan on that scale.
All I'd have to propose is that, as art hops from mind to mind, it is pretty much like the bacteria, the rise and fall of empires, the evolution of "fashions" of animals and plants, but all done so bewilderingly fast that we simply don't recognize it as any kind of evolving, developing process at all. We see it as something constantly unique and fashionable. (Which isn't entirely unreasonable: the brain's nerves, for one thing, can process complex information at such high speed that it might as well be instantaneous).
Again, this works better with the prior assumption that "art" is really made up of consistent themes, tropes, smaller components ("articles"). The "articles" are autotelic individually, but because that often involves harmonizing symbiotically, the works of art that emerge as a result look like singular entities to our eyes, ones which could be credited with being autotelic themselves, similar to how factions of cooperating bacteria might look like one big purposeful thing in the aggregate.
Propose also that they change, but at bewildering speeds, and it explains both the apparent stability of themes over time (because some good ideas stay good, so there's no benefit to changing them) and their rapid changes (because that's the default speed: they're fast anyway, like the rapid adaptability of the same types of virus).
Unfortunately for me, this still runs into the same problem: ad hoc scotch taping of gaps and cracks. Also, goodness knows how crazy I must sound by now.
"I KNOW THE TRUUUTH! I SEE EVERYTHIIING! YOU GOTTA BELIIIEEEVE MEEE!"
"Excellent."
My only defence, after all this, is that I ultimately find the idea of art being a kind of living thing (or living things) temptingly fascinating, somehow almost mystically so. Fascinating, because even the ridiculous idea that art has a will or agency or power of its own - like a life force - seems to make sense, on some level. Just stare at the term "autotelic" for too long, and do a bit of research into biology, and that's how you presumably get a runaway idea like this.
Or maybe this is all just me chasing a vanity. Just a long-winded way of coming back to the original point: that art, like a lot of things, doesn't have any point other than to be itself. It's fundamentally as simple as that. How and why may not be sensible questions to begin with.
Self-Purpose Means... Self-Purpose Ends
Well, thank you for reading, and I hope the speculation at the end - however mad and illogical it is - at least provided rich enough food for figurative thought. Even when an idea's wrong, it can potentially be a useful signpost on our way to finding one that's better. And amusing in its own right, of course.
"Hey! You! What was that!? Just why was there so much Twilight in this post!? I'm the star! Don't I get a part to play in any of th-!?"
Thanks for coming! Till next time! Impossible Numbers out!
Quelle horreur!
Well, I think there is an argument to be made that art is alive in the same way that a human being is conscious and self-aware. The physical components (individual works of art and brain cells) are "dead" when on their own, but "alive" when actively exchanging elements (electrochemical stimuli or memes/themes/styles) with other "components." Text or illustration is just externalized memory. Both, as systems, are patterns changing in response to input and processing.
Anyway, that was a fascinating read, thanks.
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Hm, I'm not sure about the specific target of that comparison: there's more to being alive than exchanging elements with other components. Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I hope this explanation makes it clear:
It's true brain cells - any human cell, really - relies on other cells to stay alive (and, in the case of brain cells, to receive instructions on whether or not to send an electrochemical signal), but...
Let's define "alive" and "dead" in strict biological terms. Allow that "alive" or "dead" can be defined as whether or not a subject generates or regulates its own energy and material, internally, even though it needs to take both from outside to stay alive (i.e. consumes food and respires).
On this definition, the brain cell on its own - like any cell - doesn't just take from other cells and its surroundings (such as oxygen from blood cells, and food molecules through the cell membrane), but also regulates its own energy and material internally. Inside the cells, smaller substructures (like the mitochondria) perform the actual work of metabolizing material and extracting energy from the food and oxygen ingested. In a sense, an individual brain cell is "alive" in its own right, even if it would die once physically isolated from other cells.
Whereas, even while created and managed by humans, works of art have no such internal mechanisms by which they could in any degree regulate themselves. They're artefacts of life forms, not living things themselves. They don't have any equivalent of "mitochondria", basically. When someone writes a play or acts it out, for example, the energy produced and spent is produced and spent by the human participants themselves: the writer, the actors, the audience experiencing a performance. Insofar as art is "alive" in this context, I wouldn't put the emphasis on the work of art itself.
That said... art could be "alive" if we simply readjust the point of focus.
Instead of the physical works outside the mind, consider the art as it exists in the mind, in the thoughts, feelings, drives, and behaviours of living people. I suppose you could argue it is alive in the mind and its structures, as teams and collections of brain cells. It's similar to how bacteria/combinations of individual cells in all shapes and sizes and relationships with other organisms/cells are alive - because they regulate their own internal energy and material, individually and collectively.
Or, of course, I'm overthinking your comparison and/or otherwise misunderstood it too literally. I don't rule that out.
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Also, sorry about the long comment. I'm trying to be careful and accurate, but it might turn out I'm actually being overwhelmingly pedantic. I hope it clarifies my position, at least.
The problem I have with New Criticism's autotelic art, and Barthes' "Death of the Author" is that art does not, and cannot, exist in a vacuum. All art is a product of the context in which it is created; it is very much a product of the artist's influences, culture, and mental state. The reason that we are able to understand and appreciate art created outside our own individual immediate cultures and states of mind is that so much of human culture and human thought is universal, it's carried down through the ages, replicated from generation to generation, person to person. Some is lost, some is created anew, but the bulk of it persists.
At which point you end up with Deleuze and Guatarri's "Body Without Organs" -- ambiguous and undifferentiated potential without form or structure to provide it coherence.
Ultimately, boiled down to its simplest, most fundamental state, Art is Communication. It is an attempt to communicate abstract concepts in a tangible medium. The reason so many artists are willing to sacrifice themselves (and occasionally those around them) for their art, is that their art is their voice, it is how they communicate their humanity, and how they connect to the greater body of humanity.
Art is also how culture and humanity persists, as noted in my first paragraph above. Art is how we encode, preserve, and transmit culture -- ideas, aesthetics, and ethics -- down through the ages. Sometimes its original meaning is lost or distorted, but enough of it is preserved that we can maintain a connection to our past, to our ancestry, and understand them as well as we understand anyone at all, even ourselves.
And as art depends on context and prior influences, all art is to some degree connected to all other art, all components dependent on each other for their existence and purpose. Art is the "organs" in the "body" of human culture; the structure and form given to human creative potential, that enables communication. It is "alive" in the way that human culture is "alive".
(I doubt all that is quite what D&G had in mind, but given that they themselves rarely agreed or even truly understood what they meant by this analogy, I find my version a better fit than anything they came up with.)
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No worries! I was going more for the broader comparison between consciousness and the artistic environment/ecosystem than the particular underlying mechanisms, anyway. In that light, the survival of individual works of art, or intellectual memes (in the original sense of the word) despite the death of the artist or brain cells that originated them, still hold some analogous merit.
BTW, individual brain cells in vitro will connect and self-organize to a degree. There's been a recent kerfuffle over the "brain cells trained to play pong" research paper (which almost totally misunderstood due to a combination of bad science reporting and a truly terrible abstract), that illustrates this.
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I think I have to disagree (at least in part) with this. I don't think art is a very good way to communicate abstract concepts at all. There certainly is a great deal of encoding going on, but as far as I can tell, any observers separated by any significant amount of time are absolutely terrible at decoding the author's/artist's intent. Old works are always interpreted through the distorting lens of the current culture. Even such a simple and straightforward statement as, "Thou shalt not kill," can be twisted into something completely unrecognizable by a motivated and/or ignorant thinker.
As a huge fan of historical fiction, I can attest that there is a pernicious component to this phenomenon. Anything hugely popular from an earlier age is assumed to be of value in a ponderous, intellectual way, when in fact, most of what we hold up as "great works" of literature or art were the equivalent of Stephen King novels or Marvel movies. Moby Dick and The Three Musketeers are excellent examples of this. Both novels are absolutely crammed with comedic bits, which everybody completely misses nowadays because the few people who actually read them rather than the Cliff Notes have been primed to expect Deathless Classics full of Important Themes. (Okay, the Richard Lester films caught some of Dumas' slapstick, but that's a single outlier.)
I do agree that D&G et al, are way off-track, but then I think most art/literature analysis is 99% vaporware. Entertainment and enjoyment are the truly lasting qualities of art, not meaning. Cave paintings of horses, antelope, &c. are still beautiful despite the fact that we have no idea what other purpose they were created for.
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"Thou shalt not kill" is not an abstract concept; it's about as concrete a concept as exists. Killing is an extremely tangible action.
Yet it works better than any other medium. Look at statues from the Akkadian Empire, from Egypt during just about any major Dynastic period, the Hellenic Greeks, the imperial Romans, or any of a dozen other cultures and you can easily recognize the abstract concepts of Authority, Power, Majesty, Domination, and the Rightness of Rulership long after the inscriptions around the statues have been worn away or their languages forgotten.
Look at the decorative arts from any period of human history and the abstract concept of Beauty shines through recognizably.
Look at the cave paintings you referenced, at Lasceaux and elsewhere, and you see not just Beauty, but also Life, Spirit, Nature, the essential horse-ness, antelope-ness of the animal paintings jumps right out at you. Even the simple handprints communicate Life and Humanity, a declaration that We Exist which pervades all art ever made.
Those concepts are not culturally-dependent, they're universal; and part of all human cultures throughout history, and nothing has communicated them as consistently or persistently as the art that humans have made, from the simplest to the most complex.
To my knowledge, no one here is saying otherwise, and that's a complete non-sequitur in any case since it has nothing to do with any comments I made. "Great Literature" vs. "Popular Literature" is a false dichotomy in any case, it's an artificial distinction that has no consistent, widely-accepted definition. It's all human literature, some of which is better, some worse, some more universal, some more topical and context-dependent. "Fine Art" vs. "Folk Art" vs. "Popular Art", is a similarly artificial categorization. These categories can be useful when discussing the, techniques, purpose and meaning of art; but are utterly worthless when used to create an arbitrary hierarchy of value and importance.
Which is a complete impossibility, since "vaporware" refers to something that simply doesn't exist, something that is asserted will exist at some point in the future, but never actually manifests. If you can read it, it exists and thus by definition is not vaporware; regardless of its perceived intellectual or emotional validity or lack thereof.
Ah, so that's where Brecht got it from.
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Exactly. Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" is at least partly derived from that concept of defamiliarization, though I think in his case he focused more on metacommentary: breaking down the Fourth Wall to draw attention to the artifice of the play.
Ideas like that have strange ancestors as well as descendants. Go back a hundred years from Brecht's time to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's, and he talks about the "film of familiarity" that "blinds us to the wonders of the world", while his contemporary P. B. Shelley talked about stripping "the veil of familiarity from the world".
I find the first quoted part more persuasive than the second, though it's true art and culture influence each other both ways. It's true creating art is an act of communication between people, but I think the majority of the credit for "how we encode, preserve, and transmit culture" belongs to more mundane languages and written media, with art (including literature) as a special case.
In any case, all three - languages, written media, and art - if anything, deviate over time enough that it's hard for me to think of them as universal except in the most bland and abstract ways. Most obviously, every culture uses language, but languages plural over time become mutually unintelligible unless someone sets out to be a polyglot, and even the same language changes so much over time that the thoughts of a few centuries or millennia back need some degree of deciphering (think of Chaucer's English, to say nothing of Old English and the Germanic precursors). That suggests it's just as much about altering or even challenging the status quo as it is preserving it.
Art is that with a vengeance because the intentions of the author, if anything, are even more opaque and dressed-up. Think of the many interpretations of Shakespeare, and how much of the man's thoughts can possibly be inferred from the speeches of Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. Without being able to go back in time and talk to him, we can't just read his plays and get it right first time. We have to patiently investigate and speculate on the meaning of his art, precisely because there's no guarantee he wasn't wrapping it in more layers than seems apparent.
I'm not sure about this. The trouble is that we don't actually know what the art meant for the people who created it. There are plenty of ideas, and it's easy to project meaning onto something ambiguous, but that very ambiguity makes it ill-equipped to come to any precise conclusions.
When the people are thousands of years dead, and belonged to what was almost certainly a radically unfamiliar culture to us, and correspondingly would've had a view of the world likely to make the difference between Ancient Greek natural philosophers and modern scientists look like close siblings by comparison... I don't know. I just find it hard to imagine how we could be certain they meant what we think they meant.
I'm really not sure about the logic of this. In a survival sense, it seems peculiar: communication makes more sense as a tool to deal with others (giving them immediate instructions, asking for information, pointing things out, or getting what we want) than as an attempt to connect with literally every human being who's ever existed, not least because I don't think artists are guaranteed to have such species-wide thoughts in mind at all (I gather it's only relatively recently in our history that a concern for humankind has been viable, rather than a narrower concern for whatever group, tribe, race, or nation we happen to belong to).
In another sense, it also seems peculiarly redundant to me for one human to tell another human that they are human, not only if it's supposed to be a universal trait anyway, but also when it involves such a massive amount of time and effort to accomplish. If it requires such energy to alert another human to the fact, then it seems to me it isn't a universal, but something that has to be learned from one's specific culture, and that means the particular tenets of a culture aren't guaranteed to have common humanity in mind. Therefore the resultant art will not have it, either.
Concerning what you say about artists "willing to sacrifice themselves (and occasionally those around them) for their art", it's this specifically altruistic impulse that makes me wonder about the comparison between the elements of art and living things, because it really is very peculiar in that light.
In biology, altruism normally requires such a special set of circumstances (for instance, blood ties or a subtle kind of mutualism) that it's easier to find self-interest, neutralism, and the more obvious forms of mutualism. It's harder than you'd think to find a case where an organism is willing to self-sacrifice without individual gain, not unless it's being manipulated by another.
Admittedly, the general rule is "humans are the exception" regardless of what I say, because humans don't always play by the rules. Still, if there was a natural explanation behind it, then I think it'd look something like the idea that art acts much like a living thing in its own right. It's able to influence humans for its own survival and reproductive success, which sometimes means mutual benefit, sometimes means neither harm nor help, and sometimes means persuading the host to act dangerously, even suicidally. After all, there are plenty of examples of one organism surviving by sacrificing another: altruism and parasitism may be two sides of the same coin.
I could be wrong, and odds are I am, simply because I don't have any evidence whatsoever besides spooky coincidences. Still, it's a little surprising to think that such a thing as our very concept of humanity might itself be a subtly disguised living thing in our heads.
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Whoops, sorry! Forgot to link to your comment in my reply! See my previous post!
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Something I kept coming across when looking up literary criticism was the centuries-old idea of a firm distinction between "high" art (such as tragedies) and "low" art (such as comedies), and how potentially scandalous it was to mix the two levels in a single work.
(This is probably why Shakespeare, who notoriously mixed and matched, took a long time to become the official Greatest Playwright - you can thank the Romantics for that reinterpretation).
At least, that's how I remember it. Then again, his plays largely seemed fairly popular in his time, just not to the same extent.
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Yep, Shakespeare is a great example! He really was the Stephen King of his time. During his lifetime he was disdained by the "high" art set ("An upstart crow!") and got stinking rich from theaters packed with working people.1 After his death, his plays were performed for over 400 years, not from any dedication to "high" art, but because most plays in that time period2 were pretty bad, and to keep from going out of business, theaters would put in productions of tried and true crowd-pleasers, i.e. one of Shakespeare's Top 10.3 The plays have survived for so long because they are damned good story-telling and very entertaining. (Also, his scene-work is impeccable.)
But academic theory reared its ugly head and it was decided that the longevity of the plays was because they were IMPORTANT WORKS of "high" art, and all sorts of post facto themes were grafted on, and dozens of conspiracy theories about who "really" wrote Shakespeare's play rose up.4
As for mixing "high" and "low" art; get hold of an annotated copy of Romeo and Juliet some time and look at the opening scene where the Montague boys are hanging around the
mallpalazzo talking about all the girls they "know." The dialogue, under the very thin veneer of Early Modern English metaphor, is absolutely filthy. His plays are full of this sort of stuff, and the groundlings loved it, and Shakespeare was only elevated to literary godhood after the language drifted enough that the general public didn't understand the dirty jokes.I really think the false dichotomy of "high" and "low" art has done more damage to good storytelling, whether through novels, poetry, or visual presentations, than any other crackpot set of cookbook rules (e.g., The Heroes Journey, Save the Cat, &c.) "High" art is just another artificial distinction and excuse to reinforce a hierarchy in the literary (and art) world.
-------------------
1- And upper-class people, too. They just pretended that they liked Marlow better.
2- Or any other time period, honestly.
3- Completely Unrelated News: Orchestra tickets for the current Broadway production of the ancient musical, The Music Man are going for $900.00 a pop.
4- Because, obviously, a mere commoner couldn't possibly have written these MONUMENTAL WORKS of LITERATURE, and it had to be the Earl of Oxford (who was an incompetent drunk who died ten years before the last 13 plays were produced, BTW.)
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And then there's Chaucer! (cue Ye Olde Laugh Track).
It's been a while, but I remember learning about the Shakespeare blend of high and low when I was studying way back when. My English teacher was pretty relaxed about the whole thing, being pretty eccentric himself (I don't remember what specifically he did that made him eccentric, except that he used to joke a lot and introduced us to a radio drama adaptation of King Lear whose main actor was the "no no no no no" guy from The Vicar of Dibley).
I even remember giving a brief presentation on Shakespeare's influence and influences (this was when I first learned the neologisms that derived from his plays numbered in the hundreds), and at one point I did quote the quote from Greene's Groat's-Worth of Wit. It's worth noting that a common M.O. of Shakespeare's was to take pre-existing stories or inspirations for stories and basically write more daring versions. Definitely an unconventional writer in many ways.
It all seems incredibly amusing in hindsight.
Ah, the old "if it's incomprehensible, it MUST be art!" defence. Probably just as well.
Not to this level of detail, but I remember my English teacher was pretty blunt about the snobbish implications behind anti-Stratfordian schools of thought as well. He didn't have much time for it at all. That insight's stuck with me ever since.
Incidentally, "anti-Stratfordian" is one of the bigger entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. It's practically a fatal vivisection.
It's no secret that art is often wrapped up in status and power. Reinforcing hierarchies is just another part of the package.
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Your teacher sounds wonderful! I wish I had had more like him.
OMG! I loved that guy! Him as Lear? I think my brain may have to go sit down for a while...
As well it should be! I will have to go give that a look!
Yep, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Grimmelshausen, all terrific (and rude) storytellers under-appreciated by modern audiences because of the language barrier. People nowadays know Mother Courage as Brecht's dreary SYMBOL and not the bawdy con-woman who once slapped an Italian noblewoman with a pig's bladder full of offal and urine. Truly a terrible loss to Our Noble Cultural Heritage.
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Don't really have the time or energy right now to go over everything, did want to address a few key points:
You're creating false dichotomies here, These are all essentially just different levels of the same thing the same thing. Tribe, race, nation, whatever; they're all ways of saying "Us".
You're also assuming everything they do is entirely conscious and rationally justified; when it's clearly not. People may not themselves clearly understand why they make handprints on a cave wall, but it's an impulse that has been part of humanity for all of its existence -- a need to declare their existence and presence. The same in Europe, Africa, Australia, the Americas, down through many millennia all humans do something similar. And not just homo sapiens, there have been discoveries of artistic creations from other human lineages as well, most notably the neanderthals.
Given that we can still understand the minds of people who existed thousands of years, I disagree. There's half a millennium of recorded history; and everything we can read makes perfect sense to us now. The earliest forms of writing were apparently for the purpose of paying taxes to a ruler. The oldest known storytelling tackles themes that we still write about to this day; and are based on oral histories that go back even farther.
Widely disparate human cultures separated by tends of thousands of years are still perfectly capable of communicating effectively with each other once language barriers are overcome. Their stories bear strong resemblance to each other, their cultures have many similarities, they are all recognizably human (the fact that many of them tried to exterminate many others in a conflict over resources or ideology is even something we have in common throughout recorded and much of oral history). When Europeans encountered indigenous peoples in the Americas, their cultures were not so radically different as the ideologues tried to make out, despite at least ten to fifteen thousand years of separation.
Looking at the archaeological records, the more we dig and discover, the more prehistoric humans come to resemble modern humans in all ways that matter. They had the same challenges, used the same symbols and social structures millennium after millennium. They hunt and gather the same way, they farm the same way, they develop religions that are not at all dissimilar from each other.
We see the same motifs used over and over and over, the same concepts communicated. Not just to other humans, but in places humans are highly unlikely to ever see them, deep within difficult-to-to-access caves, or nearly-inaccessible heights of rocky mountains. There's something fundamental to human creativity that persists throughout time.
And in every human group throughout history, their name for themselves is "The People", "The Human Beings". When two groups encounter each other for the first time, they often have the same response, to question whether the other group is, in fact, human like they are, or some other form of being. Yet they always manage to find common ground without much effort.
There's no reason to believe that the last ten thousand years are any different from the previous ten thousand, or the previous ten thousand. Remember, modern humans have only existed for about two hundred thousand years.
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I've been lucky with teachers, really, or at least can't remember any really bad ones. He still stands out to me, though, not least because he was the first to open my eyes to the brilliance of Shakespeare with the study of King Lear (it's still my favourite play for that reason).
Here's something to drop in your lap, then! I just looked up the cast list: Trevor Peacock was the man I was thinking of. And yes, he was indeed a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, though I can't find the King Lear credit on the Wikipedia page (they might not have listed all of his roles, though it's also sadly possible I might have misremembered that particular detail).
From what I remember, he was an impressively regal vocal artist. I didn't even recognize him when I first heard the recording.
I think this is, what, the third book I've tossed your way now?
Have to raise a guilty hand here and admit I'd never heard of Grimmelshausen before: my reading's mostly been anglocentric. Boccaccio vaguely rang a bell, but I had to look him up to recognize him as the author of The Decameron.
Chaucer I remember especially (partly because of the pub humour level of his tales, but mostly) because of the tidbit that his great work The Canterbury Tales was never actually finished. Edmund Spencer's The Fairie Queene suffered a similar problem (I remember studying the first book way back when, which was self-contained and about as subtle as a brick with the words "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN" carved into it).
Series Hiatus: Been A Thinge Since Medieval Times!
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You really make me want to go back and re-watch The Vicar of Dibley now. There were so many brilliant comic actors involved. I wonder if there's a YouTube compilation of the after credit bits? Those were brilliant!
Well, if I can return the favor(s) by turning you onto Grimmelshausen, I'm a happy guy. (Seriously, Mother Courage is a hoot and the others are terrifically entertaining.)
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You mean a sense of social belonging? I think that natural desire for a connection with others isn't necessarily the same as sensing a broader "humanity", as such, though if a society also defines who belongs in "humanity" and who doesn't, it would amount to the same conclusion. But we are a social species at heart, I see that.
Please let me clarify: I think my point about species-wide thoughts applies to any subconscious urges too. Although given your previous point, I can see where rephrasing that as the urge for social belonging would definitely fit into the picture: consciously or subconsciously, humans strive to create society and become unhealthy without it.
Yes, I think I see your point: you're talking about the human condition. Certainly, there's not much scope for biological evolution over that timespan, since it's too slow. Especially when you consider that humans are more genetically uniform than most other species (possibly a bottleneck effect due to a catastrophe tens of thousands of years ago), it's easy to see how we'd have a lot in common.
I still think cultural evolution creates a lot of differences with that raw material, enough to diverge dramatically, but what you say makes more sense to me now.
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Not just unhealthy, human survival itself depended heavily on our ability to develop and maintain consistent cultures over very long periods of time, in order to preserve the knowledge crucial to finding resources, and protecting ourselves from the elements. Indo-European paleolithic peoples demonstrated regular patterns of migration, following animal migrations and seasonal foods as they became available, along well-established tracks whose memory was maintained and re-trod year after year, century after century. As well as retaining knowledge of the location of durable resources, such as the flint and chert deposits critical for tool production. As humans settled into more sedentary patterns after developing agriculture during the mesolithic, and the establishment of large communities and individual specialization during the neolithic, more complex bodies of knowledge were required to chart planting and harvesting seasons, what they needed to know in order to grow crops and keep animals, and how to preserve food for leaner seasons.
All of these were preserved in the form of stories, often given a religious framework. Stories that included not only the necessities; but often the mytho-histories and beliefs of a people. When Europeans traveled to the Americas for the first time, they encountered peoples who still maintained these same pre-historic patterns of life, and the same types of stories and oral traditions, even written traditions, forming complex webs of social interactions and shared culture over great distances.
And that's the thing, very, very few human societies have ever existed in isolation. More often, they've been parts of greater interconnected networks of trade and migration; and human culture has been shared, evolving along common patterns, as a result. Networks that extended in Eurasia from the British Isles to the Baltic Sea and Middle East. In the Americas, they stretched the length of the Pacific coast, and well into the inland as far as the Rocky Mountains.
As an example, one of the oldest known preserved pieces of ancient writing is the Hymn to Ninkasi, a religious story-song dedicated to the Sumerian goddess of beer; which is not just a religious rite, but also a recipe for the brewing of beer. And it's clear from the writing that the hymn had likely existed as an oral tradition for far longer. (Incidentally, there's a good deal of archaeological evidence that the primary impetus for humans to develop agriculture and the cultivation of cereal grains was not actually food, but in fact to produce beer.)
It's precisely this need to maintain this knowledge from generation to generation that has resulted in the persistence of human culture over time. It would be more unusual if there were many major differences between human cultures, since human survival and human communal living hasn't really changed all that much. The kind of consistency necessitated by human survival has resulted in a conservatism in how societies are maintained and information is transmitted. And art has always been a very important part of maintaining that cultural survival.
And human cultures have similarly evinced patterns that are consistent throughout history; demonstrated primarily by the rituals around death, and the accumulation of power and wealth by strong-man type leaders.
What we see as differences between cultures are often either differences in survival necessities due to the variations in local environments; or are purely superficial and transitory aspects of culture, such as gender roles, aesthetics, and the previously mentioned mytho-histories humans create to make some sense of their existence. And the arts -- storytelling, petroglyphs, and many other forms -- were essential to the preservation of those cultures and communication of knowledge over many generations.
There are at least two major bottleneck events demonstrated in the record, and possibly several more. Genetically, this is offset somewhat by interbreeding with at least three different (neanderthal, denisovan, and at least one as-yet unnamed theorizied lineage), and multiple small out-of-Africa events (it's still debatable how many, and how long any of them actually survived). The upshot is that, although humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years; human history as we know it really began only about 70,000 years ago.