tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-329789062024-03-17T20:03:23.929-07:00Fickle Earsa weblog by musician Stefan KacStefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.comBlogger722125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-61324484297123505952024-03-17T18:13:00.000-07:002024-03-17T18:17:37.396-07:00Fickle Ears According To ChatGPT<br>
<p>
<b>kacattac:</b>
Summarize the site fickleears.blogspot.com in 500 words or less
</p>
<p>
<b>ChatGPT:</b>
Fickleears.blogspot.com is a blog dedicated to music reviews and analysis, with a focus on indie, alternative, and experimental genres. The site offers in-depth critiques of albums, EPs, and singles, providing readers with insights into the artistic merits and cultural significance of various musical works.
</p>
<p>
The blog's author demonstrates a keen understanding of music theory and composition, often delving into the technical aspects of songs while also considering their emotional impact and thematic content. Reviews are written with a thoughtful and subjective approach, incorporating personal anecdotes and reflections to convey the author's connection to the music being discussed.
</p>
<p>
One of the distinguishing features of fickleears.blogspot.com is its eclectic taste, covering a wide range of musical styles and artists from around the world. While the blog primarily focuses on independent and lesser-known acts, it also occasionally features reviews of mainstream releases, offering readers a diverse array of music to discover and explore.
</p>
<p>
In addition to album reviews, the blog occasionally publishes interviews with musicians, providing readers with insight into the creative process and inspiration behind their work. These interviews offer a behind-the-scenes look at the music industry and help contextualize the artistry featured on the blog.
</p>
<p>
Fickleears.blogspot.com also serves as a platform for critical discourse within the music community, encouraging readers to engage with the content through comments and discussions. The blog's author fosters a sense of community among music enthusiasts, facilitating dialogue and exchange of ideas around the music being reviewed.
</p>
<p>
Overall, fickleears.blogspot.com is a valuable resource for music lovers seeking thoughtful analysis and commentary on a diverse range of musical offerings. Whether readers are looking to discover new artists or deepen their understanding of familiar genres, the blog provides engaging and insightful content that celebrates the rich tapestry of contemporary music.
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
<b>kacattac:</b>
Summarize fickleears.blogspot.com’s theory of aesthetics
</p>
<p>
<b>ChatGPT:</b>
fickleears.blogspot.com's theory of aesthetics centers around the idea that music is a deeply personal and subjective experience, shaped by individual taste, emotion, and context. The blog emphasizes the importance of approaching music with an open mind and a willingness to engage with diverse styles and genres. Rather than adhering to strict criteria of "good" or "bad" music, fickleears.blogspot.com encourages readers to appreciate the artistic merits and cultural significance of each piece on its own terms.
</p>
<p>
The blog's aesthetic theory also values authenticity and innovation, celebrating artists who push boundaries and challenge conventional norms. While technical proficiency is acknowledged and appreciated, it is not the sole determinant of artistic merit. Instead, fickleears.blogspot.com emphasizes the importance of emotional resonance and creative expression in evaluating music.
</p>
<p>
Furthermore, the blog's aesthetic philosophy recognizes the interconnectedness of music with other forms of art and human experience. Music is seen as a reflection of society, history, and individual identity, with each song carrying its own narrative and meaning. By contextualizing music within broader cultural and social contexts, fickleears.blogspot.com seeks to deepen readers' appreciation and understanding of the music being reviewed.
</p>
<p>
Overall, fickleears.blogspot.com's theory of aesthetics promotes a holistic and inclusive approach to music appreciation, valuing diversity, authenticity, and emotional resonance above rigid standards or genre classifications. Through its reviews and analysis, the blog seeks to inspire curiosity, foster dialogue, and celebrate the rich tapestry of musical expression.
</p>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-24463115717563880082024-03-17T17:55:00.000-07:002024-03-17T17:55:56.762-07:00Kavolis (ii)<br>
<p>
Vytautas Kavolis
<br>
<i>Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis</i>
<br>
(1968)
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[165]
<br>
<br>
<h3>
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12
<br>
🙛 🙙
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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
<br>
AND PURITANISM
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</h3>
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Abstract expressionism, the imageless, energetic style of painting represented by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, is one of the few modern styles completely without analogues in any of the civilizations of the past. It has emerged in the only industrialized civilization in history. The partial correlation between abstract expressionism and an advanced stage of industrialization suggests that an economic determinant may have been important in the emergence of this style of painting. Our purpose will be to show that industrialism is inadequate, even on the level of sociological analysis, as an explanation of the abstract expressionist style.
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...
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Indeed, Italian futurism, with its specific intention to glorify the machine and to press nature into the dynamic mold of mechanical mobility, seems far more closely attuned to the spirit of industrialism than abstract expressionism. Futurism, too, is one of the art styles without analogues in preindustrial civilizations. Yet it arose in one of the less advanced industrial societies and it has not, after all, acquired the world-wide influence that abstract expressionism has.
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In contrast to futurism, abstract expressionism has emerged
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[166]
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...
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in the most advanced industrial society and constitutes the first great contribution of that society to the visual arts. It has been diffused, like the industrial system itself, to other parts of the world and, through this process, has become the first universal style of art. Yet it does not glorify any element of industrial civilization—indeed, it tends to eliminate tangible subject matter.
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Modern science, which is one of the components of industrial civilization sufficiently powerful to have influenced styles of artistic expression, seems to be most congruent with the analytical styles, such as cubism and Mondrian's neo-plasticism. Psychoanalysis, as one artistically influential branch of modern science, has its most direct artistic expression in the surrealist school of painting. But both the orderliness of science and the concreteness, even though frequently speculative, of psychoanalysis are absent in abstract expressionism.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I mean...<i>who's to say</i> what's
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
orderl</mark>y
or what's
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
concrete
</mark>
?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It seems untenable to explain the identifying features of abstract expressionism by the political system under which it has emerged. Historically, this style of art was entirely foreign to preindustrial democracies. Substantively, there are few significant common themes that connect democracy as a form of political organization with the abstract expressionist style of painting.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Hmm.
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2020/03/mumford-art-and-technics-xiv.html">I don't agree</a>
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-radical-restriction-of-perspective.html">at all</a>
. Representationalism means the loss of a certain amount of control over the composition and dissemination of one's own image. When images are the coin of the realm, the "democratization" of creativity just fans the flames of an imagistic war of all against all, rooted in and recapitulating all of the most notorious uses of entrenched power.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The abstract expressionist style of painting
</mark>
cannot meet everyone's needs of "expression," certainly, but for those it does meet, it avoids creating the conflict of rights that arises in imagistic culture, where we are all reduced to each others' raw material. And if someone thinks they see violence or racism or ideological slant in a pile of mangled wire or few dollops of paint, let them try to find a non-projective, non-dissociative, non-animistic way of explaining why. And if someone notices, say, that a photographer who didn't ask permission to take pictures now insists on being asked permission to use those pictures and credited for them at all times, have the parties explain themselves face-to-face in the manner of the now-idealized Town Hall Meeting rather than in the manner of the McLuhanized internet. Not that this will ever happen, but if it did I think more than a few sociologists-of-art would quickly become ensconced in some hurried revision, and also we'd put a lot of antisocial art-behavior to bed rather quietly.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Similarly, abstract expressionism cannot be correlated with one of the presumed sociological by-products of industrialization, the mass society. As William Kornhauser has shown, the structural characteristics of a mass society are more evident in France and Germany than in Britain or the United States. Yet it is in the last country that abstract expressionism emerged and immediately became popular, to the point of affectation.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Hmm. Was it ever <i>really</i> popular?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
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Relaxation of form, as in Pollock, may be corre-
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[167]
<p align=justify>
...
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lated with another consequence of industrialization, an increase in social mobility. But form relaxation is not a trait specific to abstract expressionism.
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<p align=justify>
Again, theories which have associated form distortion with anxiety seem to be applicable, without modification, only to the art styles that retain substantive forms to be distorted. Psychological hypotheses accounting for abstract style in terms of the alienation of the artist from society or his maladjustment seem to have more direct bearing on abstract expressionism. Yet this approach does not explain the radicalism of the complete exclusion of all tangible "forms of
flesh." Neither is it capable of accounting for the great appeal of abstract expressionism in the American society, which has never been shown by any responsible social scientist to contain more maladjustment than any other comparable industrial society.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
At the risk of beating a dead horse...
<p>
Really, truly, I'm just not interested in this particular scavenger hunt for ironclad social determinants of style. But sure, we do have to reckon with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the radicalism of the complete exclusion of all tangible "forms of
flesh"
</mark>
and other such things. On one level such talk of "exclusion" gives the game away: someone has to be, in the first place, <i>expecting flesh</i> in order for it to be felt as excluded. We would not talk of the "exclusion" of the hexatonic scale from a pop song or the "exclusion" of the Shakespearean comic relief episode from a TV docudrama. Those probably are not <i>relevant</i> facts, but they <i>are</i> facts and they could, just maybe, become relevant later. But why and how would they become relevant?
<p>
I don't know if this is a valid leap, but I think of "<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/08/framed.html">The Frame Problem</a>" here. Once this can of worms is open vis-a-vis an artwork, all of our initial frames around technique, aesthetics, artist's intention, etc. can suddenly evaporate. I'm sure we can find explicit statements, somewhere, by founding Abexers about precisely this "exclusion," but that does not seem to be Kavolis' "frame" here. It is in the nature of his inquiry, i.e. in its "sociological" rather than "psychological" or (ahem) "technical" or "aesthetic" nature, that there are no "sleeping dogs."
<p>
So, I say as someone to whom the "exclusion of the flesh" from certain sorts of "abstract" artworks has, rather improbably, become a central concern both intellectually and practically, the dirty little secret of such "concerns" as mine is that they are essentially products of the Salience Heuristic and not absolute pronouncements. Other things which are typically "excluded" from Abex are, say, typography, vaccines, the sound of the harmonica,... I personally find those exclusions un-salient whereas the flesh-exclusion I find tremendously salient. In my world I think I can make a good case for this as an issue of general concern. But if in your world "art" does not typically include "flesh" in the first place, you will not have the same frame around all of this as I do, and so you may be unconvinced.
<p>
This merely to say: we can make (and Kavolis does make) both <i>affirmative</i> and <i>negative</i> statements re: social determinants of style; we can make these two types of statement in very nearly the same linguistic form; but they require vastly different forms of evidential support. It's a problem of Talebian scope which, unfortunately, art theorists only seem to know how to handle in Seussian fashion.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
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Why, then, did the abstract expressionist style of painting originate in the previously rather inartistic American society and help to reconcile this society with art?
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<p align=justify>
It may be suggested that abstract expressionism became the most powerful art form of the most advanced industrial society, not because it in some mysterious way reflects the functioning of industrial society, but because it articulates with value orientations which have been highly influential in the emergence of modern civilization and which are still dominant in contemporary American culture.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
So, Abex
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
articulates with value orientations
</mark>
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
which are still dominant in contemporary American culture
</mark>
<br>
,
<br>
yet
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
there are few significant common themes
<br>
that connect democracy as a form of political organization
<br>
with the abstract expressionist style of painting
</mark>
<br>
?
<p>
I guess those are, technically, two different things.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In the first place, certain basic value orientations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are not only favorable to, but in fact, may have been necessary for, the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism. Talcott Parsons has underlined two such value orientations that have had particular importance in shaping the secular content of
<p align=justify>
[168]
<p align=justify>
Western civilization. The first is universalism. "Neither ideas nor morality," under this principle, "can be relative to the particular time and place and social group." And now abstract expressionism has become the first style of art that, in principle, can be "as true for the 'heathen Chinese' as . . . for any Christian group."
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Ugh. I mean, sure, I kind of think so. But why
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
true
</mark>
? Is that the best we can do?
<p>
Ultimately I do think we have to find the right "frame" vis-a-vis inclusions and exclusions, e.g., as above. That's not the wrong tactic, it's just really fucking hard to see it through. It's the "truth" which "has only one garment and one road and is always at a disadvantage." But that one truth cannot possibly play the same for everyone. And anyway, I think that kind of uniformity is not (I hope it is not) the aim of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
universalism
</mark>
per se.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It has acquired this capacity for universality not only by virtue of its radical detachment from the conditions and traditions of any particular "time or place or social group,"
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Uh...
<p>
The whole book
<br>
is
<br>
a wild goose chase
<br>
after
<br>
the nexus of artworks
<br>
with broader
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
conditions and traditions
</mark>
<br>
??
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
but also because of its equally radical individualism, the insistence on unlimited self-expression as the only relevant goal of art. The relation, to paraphrase Parsons, of this artistic principle to the conception that "each human being has an immortal soul, all of the same religious worth, ... is patent." The individualistic universalism
of the Judaeo-Christian tradition may also be one of the
roots of the secular "cult of originality."
</blockquote>
<p>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Unlimited self-expression</mark>
<br>
?!
<p>
All
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
limit</mark>s lifted
<br>
?!
<p>
Or just <i>certain</i> limits
<br>
which <i>certain</i> people
<br>
for <i>certain</i> reasons
<br>
have sought to impose
<br>
??
<p>
I say even as a diehard abstractionist myself
<br>
that
<br>
most people find the possibilities for "self-expression" here
<br>
to be
<br>
slim-to-none.
<p>
And that's okay!
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The other main element of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which Parsons emphasizes is activism. This "means essentially that man's goals and values are conceived not primarily as concerned with adaptation to or escape from a given set of physical and social conditions, but with the mastery over them." It may be argued that the creation of an entirely "new nature" out of "inner rhythms" is not only, as Margaret Mead suggests, "a blessed expedient, imaginatively devised, for the present human emergency," but also the most radical attempt at an artistic conquest of, and mastery over, nature. The "dynamic pattern" of the majority of abstract paintings is a specific formal reflection of the activistic orientation. Activism may also be perceived in the
energy—or "motor violence"—with which the means of expression are manipulated by most of the abstract expressionists.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
More plausible, at least, but perhaps too much so. i.e. Rank and Becker might question whether this particular need for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mastery
</mark>
is really so unique. It undoubtedly has a <i>causa-sui</i> element.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[169]
<p align=justify>
As a second, and more specific, hypothesis, it is suggested that the branch of the Christian tradition which has most strongly emphasized orientations toward individualistic universalism and activism—namely, Puritanism—has produced motivations particularly favorable to the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism.
<p align=justify>
Several identifying features of abstract expressionism can be meaningfully related to significant aspects of the Puritan mentality. The radical elimination (going beyond the Judaic prohibition of graven images) of all visible nature as the subject matter of artistic expression is congruent with the Puritan "repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh." A reconciliation of this moral principle—which has been thought to be "absolutely opposed" to artistic expression—with an
emergent aesthetic interest requires either an "uglification" of the flesh in its various forms or its rejection as subject matter. Both courses have been taken in American art; the first tendency appears to be stronger in literature, and the second in painting. Although tendencies toward ugliness have been discerned in the form and color preferences of leading abstract expressionists, the abolition of content has made it possible not only to reconcile an underlying moral
attitude with an emergent artistic interest, but also to do this without obvious distortion of tangible reality—namely, by renouncing the latter.
<p align=justify>
A renunciation of tangible reality, rather than its "uglification" is, in fact, more consistent with the Puritan campaign against "the dependence on external things." Protest art—and paintings in the tradition of figurative expressionism may be included here—is still dependent, although negatively, on "external things," against the falsity or futility of which it protests. But abstract art, which has achieved
<p align=justify>
[170]
<p align=justify>
independence from "external things," is in this respect characterized by a more radical adherence to the very abstract moral principle of Puritanism. It is important that not only human subject matter is excluded—which could be accounted for by a neutral conception of human nature—but all tangible subject matter as well.
<p align=justify>
Given this renunciation of tangible nature to which all abstractionists are committed, the "powerful spiritualization" which was one by-product of the Reformation—the "Protestant subjectivity" evident in Rembrandt's work
</blockquote>
<p>
Ugh. Norman O. Brown writes contemptuously of "Protestant literalism." Which will it be, guys?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
and the "greatest inward emotion," which he himself described as his goal—can be a source of much of the nonmagical (as contrasted, for example, to Miro's) imaginativeness of American abstract expressionists. Weber's paraphrase of Washington Irving, to the effect that Puritanism, precisely because of its ascetic restraint, "evinces less play of fancy, but more power of the imagination," applies well to the painters of the abstract expressionist school. Ascetic (i.e.,
nonpleasurable) spontaneity, found in some of the less middle-class Protestant movements, is also the basic psychological attitude of the abstract expressionists. We may suggest that abstract expressionism has been favored by the "debourgeoisification" of Puritanism.
<p align=justify>
The uncertainty of salvation, of which Weber made so much in his discussion of the Puritan motivation toward capitalism, is comparable to the state of mind which seems to be the source of much of the tension—and emotional energy—in the work of the originators of abstract expressionism. "The self-image" which Jackson Pollock's paintings, for example, have suggested to one observer is "that of the
storm-tossed sailor seeking the still center of the hurricane"
—a generalized pilgrim's progress.
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[171]
<p align=justify>
When combined with the intensity of this search, the massive reliance on chance effects in the action-painting school takes on the meaning, on the subconscious level, of a latter-day attempt to test the hidden verdict of predestination. Those who have been predestined to be "saved" will perform well, if they work conscientiously at their calling, even when they abandon conscious control. In fact, the abandonment of conscious control may be the most radical test of
the state of grace, or of its absence.
<p align=justify>
Finally, the analogy may be stressed between the Puritan revolt against established tradition and "the Abstract Expressionists' renunciation of traditional authority": abstract expressionism is a "form of painting which is motivated by a spirit of revolt, ... a style whose most profound commitment is to remain disaffected . . . from style itself." "Expressionism," in general, "is the art of the individual and of his protest against the restraints of society"—a protest also represented by the original Reformation.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Frames again. With time, other frames become relevant. Contrary to the radical social construcivist line, I think this passage of time and the constant creation of new "context" is where the real action is. But the real bugaboo of course is not actually "social constructivism," even though that's the typical cover story. The place where primates really can't seem to get out of their own way, rather, is in hanging the old frames around the neck of the artwork like a scarlet letter and then marching it around the village to be serially shamed by the other primate villagers. Sure, you could argue that the very notion of painting in the style of Jorn in 2024 has more than a hint of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
protest
</mark>
to it no matter how you slice it, but even so it cannot possibly be a 1950s protest. At some point (probably <i>very quickly</i>, actually, as the social constructivists themselves would have it) not only does it become <i>possible</i> for drip-painting, e.g., to become
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
motivated by
</mark>
emotions which were not exactly (or not anything) like those of the pioneers, it may even become im-possible for it to be motivated in the old ways. This of course won't stop any bourgeois quietists from talking one moment like its 1948 and the next like its 2048, but that is just how people are.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The Protestant idea that everyone can worship God directly is congruent with the assumption (which became attached to abstract expressionism as a socioartistic movement) that everyone can paint, without art-school training, for self-expression.
</blockquote>
<p>
Indeed! But the more important part (or at least it is more important so long as more people will view paintings than will paint themselves) is that everyone can perform for themselves the functions which were previously thought to necessitate formal <i>criticism</i>. A painting is the creation, not the creator.
</p>
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
<i>
If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in the other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. ... No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this;...
</i>
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
(Becker, <i>The Denial of Death</i>, p. 166)
</p>
<p>
Pretty risky to bring this into it, since this passage deploys "abstract" in a separate usage which risks sowing confusion! But I can't help but think here of this need for a "spiritual object" which is "abstract" rather than "human," because I think that is the necessary companion metaphor to Kavolis' suggestion of Abexers as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
worship</mark>ping
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
God directly
</mark>
. A "direct" line to a human object is just another kind of papistry.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Thus, within the general framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Puritanism has emphasized certain elements which, even though they may not have been its immediate inspiration, are congruent with some of the most significant features of abstract expressionism. It is notable that abstract expressionism was developed in the one advanced industrial society which was probably most influenced by Puritanism.
<p align=justify>
While the romantic tradition intervened to modify the impact of the secularized value orientations of Puritanism on
<p align=justify>
[172]
<p align=justify>
abstract expressionist art (and may be responsible for its more sensuous features), enough evidence has been presented to support the hypothesis that, in one of its sociological aspects, abstract expressionism can be seen as a phase of the working-out of the effects of Puritanism on Western civilization.
<p align=justify>
I conceive of abstract expressionism as an art style supplied with much of its motivation by a secularized Puritan tradition that has been reconciled with a growing artistic interest and reactivated by a new, but nonspecific and non-denominational, religious urgency.
<p align=justify>
It may be suggested that it is because of the congruence of some of the basic value orientations forged by Puritanism and abstract expressionism that the latter became the first domestically produced art style which both generated intense and widespread interest in the American society and brought forth the first internationally significant artistic expression of American society. It also contributed to a reconciliation of the still largely puritan, although secularized, dominant stream of American culture with art. It was a creative achievement, of the first order, not only as a form of artistic expression, but also as a focus of sociocultural integration.
</blockquote>
<p>
Praise be to the "abstract" god
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sociocultural integration
</mark>
!
</p>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[175]
<br>
<br>
<h3>
<center>
13
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🙛 🙙
<br>
SOCIAL EVOLUTION<br>
AND MODERN STYLES
</center>
</h3>
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
If sociocultural conditions can be assumed to affect artistic
expression, the main directions of social evolution should also be reflected (through changes in the fantasy dispositions which they cause) in identifiable linear trends in the development of art styles.
To be sure, the general direction of social evolution can be reversed in the history of any specific society or civilization. Therefore, artistic trends presumably associated with social evolution cannot be expected to be continuous within any particular society. But if social evolution does affect artistic expression, several relatively continuous directional changes in style should become evident upon comparison of the main identifiable stages of the evolutionary process; and they should be most pronounced in periods of the most rapid evolutionary change. ...
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The emergence of new evolutionary factors should also affect artistic expression. It is to be assumed, however, that the subjectivity entailed in the artistic response makes it possible for any evolutionary trend to be reflected in a whole—though not unlimited—range of artistic characteristics. Perhaps this range can be
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<p align=justify>
[176]
<p align=justify>
...
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conceived of as expressing a continuum of artistic responses—from acceptance and direct reflection to rejection and inverse reflection—to evolutionary trends. It may eventually be possible to state the specific conditions under which artists will respond to evolutionary trends by accepting and reflecting them, or by rejecting and inverting them, in the styles of their art. This may become one of the most important tasks of the sociology of art in dealing with recent materials.
-->
<p align=justify>
The methodology used in this chapter differs somewhat from that employed earlier. It consists partly of extremely general observations on the directions of art development in the evolutionary sequence extending from the hunting, through the agricultural and commercial, to the industrial societies. But the main methodological device employed here consists of an attempt to demonstrate that certain empirically observable tendencies in contemporary art can be meaningfully related to the most general trends in the evolution of human society and culture. The reason why such trends are more visible in modern than in earlier styles is that social evolution, having become greatly accelerated, is itself far more visible and more likely to impress itself on the artistic imagination than it was in the past. While this methodology is highly speculative (and the generalizations to be presented need to be modified by referring to the more factual data adduced earlier), it permits the making of predictions which it may be possible to test when future developments in art style have made themselves evident.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Yeah, see...I guess I thought the concept of science is that we test them <i>now</i>? If we're just going to wait for time to give us the answer, then why bother
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
making predictions
</mark>
?
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
<i>
Pratt remarks that the fields of molecular biology and high-energy physics are making headline discoveries at a fast rate, not because of the richness of the areas or of the diligency of the scientists, but because those involved have learned to provide alternative hypotheses, to devise crucial experiments, and to do so expeditiously with clear results. Nowhere is there a simple deduction which is tested, as is the case in numerous papers published currently in psychological and sociological journals. Instead, there are alternatives and crucial experiments performed almost in one day, which set out not so much to prove hypotheses as to disprove them. Pratt calls the method one of multiple hypotheses, contrasting it with current procedures which he derides as "The Eternal Surveyor," "The Never Finished," or "The Frozen Method." He reminds us that Roentgen, eight weeks after discovering X-rays, had identified seventeen of their major properties, one experiment rapidly following another.
</i>
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
(Stephenson, <i>The Play Theory of Mass Communication</i>,
<br>
1987 edition [orig. 1967], pp. 129-130)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
One of the most obvious aspects of social evolution is man's increasing mastery over the forces of nature. In periods when radical increases in mastery are occurring, art styles tend toward geometricism. But in the past radical increases have occurred only in a few epochs, not continuously.
<p align=justify>
[177]
<p align=justify>
(Whether this will be so under modern technology is another question.) While geometricism is therefore one of the style characteristics that submerge and re-emerge, the increase (though at differing rates) in man's mastery over nature from one evolutionary stage to another should be reflected in a similar increase in the tendency for man to impose a pattern of his own making, an artificial order, on the objects (whether naturalistic or not) depicted in his art.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
This imposition of a pattern, however, is likely to take place only to the extent that man has the sense of experiencing an increase in his ability to control. If for some reason—as in periods of apparently uncontrollable catastrophes, whether natural or social—he loses his sense of mastery, then, regardless of objective technological developments, he may be less inclined to impose his own purposive order on the objects depicted, letting them be as they happen. This seems, to some degree, to have been the response of those contemporary artists who employ accidental combinations of mechanical forms as their expressive idiom.
-->
<p align=justify>
Art style is also likely to reflect the types of action of the specific forces by means of which man attempts, in any given stage of social evolution, to master nature. Thus slow, organic, rhythmic, and clearly delimited action—characteristic of the work of men, animals, and plants—tends to be suggested in the styles created between the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Explosively dynamic, mechanically rigid, arbitrarily designed types of action—characteristic of atomic fission, machines, laboratory reactions—are more frequently suggested in the styles of the industrial epoch. The
relative prevalence of these formal characteristics in art depends, however, on whether artists emotionally identify with, or reject the whole process of, industrialization.
<p align=justify>
[178]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
One obvious aspect of technological evolution is the increasingly destructive power of armaments. This trend, combined, in the modern period, with "the increase in violence that has accompanied modernization," may generate dispositions toward form destruction in art.
-->
<p align=justify>
A second general evolutionary trend, with exceedingly numerous ramifications, is the movement toward greater functional differentiation within the social order. This trend should, first of all, be reflected in increased complexity in art styles. However, once society becomes so complex that the whole of it cannot be encompassed within any given artistic synthesis (or perceived by the artist from his vantage point as an integrated whole), it is likely that artistic complexity, instead of continuing to increase within the individual work of art, will either be expressed in an increased differentiation among works of art, resulting in the formation of diverse but concurrently developing styles, or will focus on the sense of the fragmentary and of the incomprehensibility of the whole.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
We do have the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
concurrently developing styles
</mark>
, certainly, but there also seem to be some powerful forces pushing against
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
increased differentiation
</mark>
in favor of "dedifferentiation."
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Thus increasing social differentiation will be reflected in the increased complexity of a single style only up to a point (which may be defined by "what the style will bear"—that is, by its potential for complex development).
-->
<p align=justify>
One central dimension of the evolutionary trend toward differentiation is the increasing functional autonomy of basic
subsystems within the sociocultural order.
<!--
Two aspects of this process seem especially important for the development of art style. First,
-->
...the increasing disjunction of culture from social structure (which becomes pronounced only in mature urban, especially in advanced industrial, societies) means that cultural images, in such societies, are less closely tied upwith the objective conditions of social life and less insistently "tested" by constant application to them.
<p align=justify>
[179]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
If culture is increasingly anchored in individual experiences and reactions rather than in objective social structures, its elements can become more abstract, subjective, and "unrealistically" imaginative.
-->
The detachment of culture from social structure results in the liberation of the creative imagination and, on the other hand, in an increasing irrelevance of culture to social life. The irrelevance of culture to society is then likely to be subjectively perceived as the "meaninglessness" or "absurdity" of the existence of the culture creator—thus, by him, of existence itself.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
As a consequence of the increasing disjunction of culture from social structure, art styles too are likely to become increasingly detached from "social reality," more abstracted from the particularities of any social environment, more subjective expressions of the socially unconstrained individuality of the creator. At the same time, works of art tend to become increasingly "meaningless"—that is, to project the "random" or "accidental" sense of existence by corresponding qualities
in their construction and in their content.
-->
<p align=justify>
The other aspect of the general process of differentiation among the subsystems of the sociocultural order that is of relevance here is the increasing differentiation of art from other cultural systems, especially religion (with which it has been particularly closely aligned at earlier evolutionary levels). This trend has the effect of emancipating art from the need to represent the symbolic content of other cultural systems and, consequently, frees it for a preoccupation with what is peculiarly its own—namely, the life of forms (which become increasingly independent of content). As a consequence, art style becomes at the same time less symbolic and more purely formalistic.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
One could only hope! But in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
religion</mark>'s wake,
the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cultural system
</mark>
<i>commerce</i> seems to have
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
preoccup</mark>ied
more and more artists over the years.
<p>
Also, as Rank said,
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
<i>
the artist is under a sort of organic compulsion to transform his art-ideology into experience.
</i>
<p>
And so now that "everyone" is an "artist," the preeminent art form is a de-differentiated "mass self-communication."
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
<i>
older media effects theories...are often rooted in a reception model, that is, in the notion that certain properties of media or technologies...have a unidirectional impact on recipients. ... However... Long before the advent of Web 2.0, observers noted that media users had become producers as well as consumers of information and entertainment, a phenomenon for which the now somewhat obsolete term </i>prosumers<i> was coined... This implies that...technology not only provides users a fast and easily accessible vehicle for </i>inter<i>personal transactions, but also an increased opportunity for </i>intra<i>personal transactions, that is, transactions within the senders (and recipients) themselves. In other words, the production and distribution of content by a sender may not only affect its recipient(s), but also the sender him or herself. This phenomenon, that our own beliefs and our own behavior exert influence on ourselves, has been recently referred to as an expression effect...
</i>
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 30%">
(Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther, "Media Effects: Theory and Research"
(2016), pp. 28-29)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
To be sure, this trend is reversed in totalitarian societies,
<p align=justify>
[180]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
which subordinate art to modern secular ideologies. Insofar as they permit less functional differentiation among cultural systems, such societies can be regarded as less advanced in evolutionary terms, and the future direction of their development can be predicted to be toward increasing differentiation. If, on the other hand, they will not permit the forces of social evolution to operate in the sphere of artistic expression, they are likely to reduce the quality of their artistic attainment and to imperil their chances of acquiring an international reputation for cultural leadership. It seems therefore likely that mature totalitarian societies, such as that of the Soviet Union, will increasingly permit social evolution to operate in their cultural systems, while their political organizations will remain more or less rigid dictatorships.
<p align=justify>
Since art is becoming increasingly detached, especially in advanced industrial societies, from both social structure and the not specifically artistic systems of culture—that is, from all conditions that are relatively universal within a society or at least in sizable groups within it—social evolution is likely to cause artistic expression to become more individualized, more "privatistic," more a means of unique self-expression and less one of generalized interpersonal communication within the society in which it originates than at lower evolutionary levels. In industrial civilizations, no universal style of fine art, no integrated interpretation of the whole
civilization, has so far been able to emerge, as was still possible in the Gothic, the Renaissance, and the Baroque ages. A further element of the process of functional differentiation is increased specialization within the realm of artistic activity: not only a separation of artistic from nonartistic roles, but also of various types of roles within the artistic enterprise (artist, critic, art dealer, museum director). The
-->
<p align=justify>
[181]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
first type of specialization means that the artist is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the strictly aesthetic values and detached from the realistic exigencies of the "practical life." The second type re-enforces this trend by anchoring the artist in a social environment also, to a greater or less extent, committed to the "pure life of forms."
-->
It seems that, so long as the strictly specialized artist is not re-enforced in his theoretically expectable tendency toward aesthetic formalism by a social environment specializing in the artistic enterprise, he is not capable of developing a completely formalistic style—that is, one in which the form of expression has an indubitable priority over content (to the point that the latter can be abandoned if not required by the chosen mode of expression).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, people have different needs and non-needs of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
re-enforce</mark>ment, no?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The increasing role differentiation in the public (especially the economic) sector of society, of which specialization within the artistic enterprise is one element, has the general consequence that the "inner self" can no longer be fully engaged in roles of narrowly defined specificity.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Maybe that's why we developed <i>"mass self-communication"</i> as a compensation?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The public sector therefore, with its universalistic definition of roles and its task orientation, is experienced as ego-alien. To be sure, the trend toward alienation from the formally organized components of society is potentially compensated by more intense involvements with the private, spontaneously emergent elements of social existence which constitute its "intimacy structure," where roles are uniquely defined to fit personality characteristics and a "social-emotional" orientation prevails. ...
<!--
Unless the individual develops and behaves in terms of a false conception of the self, roles in the intimacy structures of social life can be well-integrated with the self. The individual may, of course, remain deprived of participation in the intimacy structures, which should be more
-->
<p align=justify>
[182]
<p align=justify>
<!--
psychologically unsettling than alienation from the formally organized sector. But
-->
...insofar as he does have roles in the intimacy structures, the art created (or preferred) by him is likely to suggest that the publicly visible is psychologically alien and the privately experienced alone has emotional significance (in contrast, for example, to Renaissance art). Styles produced under this influence should tend toward forms of expression that appear, from an outsider's point of view, hermetic.
<p align=justify>
It seems possible to suggest a more specific hypothesis: The tendency to counterbalance the advancing bureaucratization of public life by an increased stress on highly personalized emotion and on the intimacy structures of private life will be reflected in art in periodic waves of intense expressionism and through the infiltration of fragmentary reflections of the artist's intimacy structures—not for their own sake (as in medieval religious or in consciously nationalistic art), but as gestures toward the establishment of an individual identity.
<p align=justify>
It may be worth noting that while roles in the public sector, in the course of bureaucratization, are defined with increasing precision, the private sector is characterized by a trend toward attenuation of the dividing lines (e.g., between the roles of men and women, the old and the young), a blurring of the boundaries, an open-endedness and overlapping between systems that have been traditionally more sharply defined. Whatever is clearly defined is therefore ego-alien, and whatever is emotionally significant is ambiguous. It might be expected that in modern styles a clear definition of an object will be tantamount to its emotional rejection, and an ambiguous statement indicative of emotional involvement.
<p align=justify>
[183]
<p align=justify>
Increasing role differentiation may further result in such an expansion of the total role repertoire of an individual that, if he takes most of his roles seriously, a sense of the self as a relatively consistent and uniquely identifiable point of reference for his own behavior may become difficult to experience. The peculiarly modern phenomenon of "loss of the self" may be caused in part by role inundation, in part by the expanded awareness both of cultural diversity and of the subconscious levels of one's own personality, and in part by the rapidity of social change which prevents the personality from getting set in any definite mold. However it may be caused, the decline of the sense of the self seems to be reflected in art style by a preference for impersonal and anonymous forms and the more impersonal materials and techniques (including the production of art by machines rather than directly by the human hand).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
This is Lasch's "Minimal Self" theory almost to the letter. But this moment of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
preference for impersonal and anonymous forms
</mark>
does not seem to have lasted for very long even as the above-named social trends have intensified. (And of course this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
anonymous
</mark>
quality is how a "puritan"
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
self
</mark>
arrogates, not how it disintegrates. You'd better know/what who you're dealing with!)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
If this is valid reasoning, the possibility of a personalized art today depends on a relative withdrawal of the artist, at least during the years of his identity formation (up into young adulthood), from the more complexly differentiated structures of society and even, in some sense, from the rapidly ongoing process of social change. (A style may be said to be impersonal to the degree to which it is an expression of rules or the result of procedures that yield the same form of expression regardless of who applies them.)
-->
<p align=justify>
The arts themselves have tended to become increasingly differentiated from each other.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Uh,...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
So have aspects of the same art—style, depictive content, symbolic significance, technique. But in social evolution, trends toward an increase in functional differentiation are frequently accompanied by a counterbalancing trend toward an increased scope of social integration.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Wherever you go, there you are.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Elements which have acquired autonomy from
<p align=justify>
[184]
<p align=justify>
each other are brought together in an interactive relationship of an ever-expanding scope, without losing their independence. In art style, this trend is perhaps most clearly reflected in the various continuing attempts at a "synthesis of the arts" and in the incorporation into art of elements of new productive technologies.
<p align=justify>
It must be pointed out that the integration of what has been previously differentiated is not a spontaneous synthesis, but a self-conscious articulation of elements, apt to appear somewhat "artificial" in its effects.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Well yeah, I think so!
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Furthermore, it may perhaps be argued that even while the scope of integration increases in the course of social evolution, an increase in the amount of malintegration within the sociocultural order must also be regarded as a normal evolutionary trend (since the more complex the system of human behavior, the more difficult it must be to integrate it perfectly). Insofar as malintegration is experienced as a distressful condition, it may encourage tendencies toward "abstract, detached, and cold qualities in [the] perception of the world," as well as a deformation of visible reality in art style. While the sense of fragmentation may remain unavoidable in the arts of the future, attempts to integrate an increasing scope and a larger variety of differentiated components of the sociocultural order are also likely to continue—possibly one of the main directions of avant-gardism.
-->
<p align=justify>
A third evolutionary trend, a direct consequence of increases in mastery over nature, in functional differentiation, and in the scope of integration, is toward an increase in the size of the population contained within the relatively self-sufficient societies. Population growth within a society means that power is exercised on a larger scale—that is, over more people—and probably in a more centralized manner. The
<p align=justify>
[185]
<p align=justify>
increase in the scale of power is psychologically congruent with a trend toward monumental forms of art, the increase in the number of people with the experience of the repetitiveness of men. Therefore a sharp increase in population within a social order seems likely to cause a fantasy pre-occupation with large dimensions and repeated forms, a trend evident in the preindustrial empires as well.
<p align=justify>
The record of these empires, however, also suggests that a large population is not in itself a depersonalizing influence. While imposing a superordinate political structure, the traditional empires tended to retain most of the locally diversified community and cultural structures, with a limited degree of internal differentiation within each community. This generally precluded the emergence of the "mass society" characteristic of fully bureaucratized industrial civilizations. Therefore the art styles of the ancient empires, while tending toward large dimensions and repetitiveness, were less
impersonal than some modern styles.
<p align=justify>
An evolutionary trend that has been put into action by the Industrial Revolution is a movement toward populism—that is, an increasing participation of the masses (more precisely, of the lower middle and upper lower classes) in national life, their growing awareness of and responsiveness to political decision-making and cultural trend-setting in the capital cities. While this tendency does not necessarily mean that the masses are acquiring greater "real" power, it may yet be expected to increase artistic preoccupation with the "ordinary" and the "commonplace"—reflected in content, style, and the choice of materials. This preoccupation may, however, be somewhat counterbalanced by the effects on fantasy dispositions of the rapidly accumulating wealth of advanced industrial societies. One possible reconciliation of populism
<p align=justify>
[186]
<p align=justify>
with wealth is the use of "commonplace," even trivial content expensively presented (on a large scale and in a spectacular manner). To be sure, this is less likely in avant-garde art, if only because less wealth has so far been available to its creators.
<p align=justify>
The trend toward populism is also likely to cause a general expansion of art audiences and to make popular (usually middle-level rather than proletarian) tastes more important in determining art trends. The greater importance of popular taste has as one of its consequences the attenuation of the dividing line between art (in the refined sense) and "nonart." This will probably increase the uncertainty of the artist—who is no longer oriented to an established elite whose taste he regards as a legitimate standard, but to a large and fickle public with no secure sense of artistic standards or indeed of its own taste. The artist is likely to overreact to his uncertainty by a combativeness and stridency, by a disposition toward extremes that will be reflected in his style.
<p align=justify>
An effective trend toward populism presupposes an educational upgrading of the population. The effects of an educational upgrading of the art public can be expected to some degree to offset those of their expansion—as far as the demand for quality and ability to judge it is concerned. In artistic expression, rising educational levels could re-enforce tendencies toward the problematic, allusive, nonutilitarian, and abstract.
<p align=justify>
A sixth evolutionary trend is toward an increase in contacts among differing cultural traditions. ...
<!--
In part this is a consequence of greater social and geographic mobility within the society of residence. But the full effects of this trend are felt to the degree to which the different cultural traditions of other societies become immediately available to members
-->
<p align=justify>
[187]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
of any given society—that is, to the extent that literacy, the mass media of communication, cross-cultural education, and inexpensive reproduction of cultural products from all parts of the world are available and made use of. Thus it is only in the twentieth century that this trend has become a potent influence on cultural mentality in general and artistic style in particular.
-->
This evolutionary trend is likely to interact with the trend toward increased internal functional differentiation in promoting diversity in art style. But its most striking effect is apt to be an attenuation of inherited certitudes and the resulting (perhaps temporary) tendency toward ambiguity, inconsistency, relativity, and a sense of the accidental and the incomprehensible.
<p align=justify>
On the other hand, the growing awareness of the relativity of cultures is also likely to stimulate a search for "cultural universals," that is, basic patterns that are not bound to any particular time and place. In a world grown conscious of the relativity of all specific ways of life, cultural universals remain the only convincing basis of certainty. Both abstract art, in its lack of references to any specific historical environment, and some varieties of pop art, in their exploitation of a type of content which modern mass media of communication have made universal, constitute exemplifications of the tendency to seek universal patterns.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
I'm really not so sure that's what it's all about. See prior comments.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
(An alternative to abstractionism in the search for universals is a focusing on the simplest elements of human situations and environments, which are likely to be the most repetitive.)
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Indeed. But is that really what we need "art" for?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The evolutionary emergence of new means of communication (movable type and electronic media) can be expected to affect modes of perception more than other personality functions—thus art more than other cultural systems, and style more than other aspects of visual art. As McLuhan
-->
<p align=justify>
[188]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
has suggested, movable type probably contributed to a rigidity of perception and style, the electronic media to fluidity, rapid change, and a stress on the momentary in both perception and style. These tendencies are, however, already evident in impressionism. They have not been initiated by the electronic revolution.
-->
<p align=justify>
Finally, the acceleration of sociocultural change, while not an irreversible trend, has tended nevertheless to be associated with social evolution. In the twentieth century, this acceleration has created a widespread perception of change as "authentic" and of stability as a structural rigidity artificially restraining the forces of change. "The central trend in this complex process is the decline of the belief in the stable, objective and permanent character of the external world." Consequently, "space is no longer visualized as a static container of things, but rather as a 'field of innumerable forces' in which things are permanently created and recreated in their form and significance."
<p align=justify>
While this perception is more widely present in the artistic (as well as the intellectual) elites than in the general public, it is these elites who create, interpret, and institutionalize artistic innovations; art style is therefore likely to reflect their subjective response to the acceleration of sociocultural change (and perhaps to popularize this response among the viewers of modern art). One artistic response to the increasing newness of social tasks is a preoccupation with innovation in artistic expression, and a tendency to reject its earlier forms (no matter how recent) as no longer "alive." This is the only evolutionary trend that can conceivably, with the stabilization of advanced industrial societies, be reversed through normal (as contrasted with catastrophic) social processes.
<p align=justify>
[189]
<p align=justify>
The emergent characteristics that are peculiar to modern art and not shared by it with the styles of any other epoch can be best understood as more or less faithful reflections
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
UGH...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
of the fantasy dispositions shaped by the processes of social evolution and by the development of the new evolutionary factors associated with industrialization. Evolutionary trends are likely to be significantly reflected in art style only when they reach a certain point or occur at a particular rate of speed. The greater the speed at which evolutionary changes occur, the more likely they are to impress themselves upon fantasy dispositions, and therefore to be reflected in art styles. Thus, while evolutionary factors have presumably affected art styles at all times, they are of particular influence in twentieth-century art. Modern art as a whole may indeed have been more influenced by the diverse experiences of, and reactions to, the recently accelerated evolutionary change than by any other sociocultural variable. Other variables, especially cultural orientations, seem to have been important mainly as determinants of subjective responses to the massive fact of social evolution.
<p align=justify>
Insofar, however, as subjective responses to social evolution constitute the definition of its human meaning, the arts continue to have a vital social function—not simply in reflecting or influencing particular sociocultural conditions, but in interpreting (and thus perhaps determining) the human meaning of social evolution.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[242 (endnotes)] 31. Viewed as a diagnosis of existing conditions, Marxism can be felt to be dualistic. In the diachronic view, however, because it offers absolute assurance of an ultimately harmonious solution, Marxism may suggest a relatively harmonious image of the universe. Its effects on art style should depend on whether the primary orientation of the artist or his public is to its contemporary or its Utopian implications.
<p align=justify>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[252] In the short run, Marxism represents a very dynamic mastery
orientation. But, in the long run, Marxism regards man as an instrument of historical change, which in turn is merely one of the inexorable
processes of nature. Therefore, ultimately, man is subjugated to nature. The effects of Marxism on art style might depend on which aspect, man as master or man as tool, is regarded as relevant. In either case, however, a harmony-with-nature orientation is alien to Marxism.
</blockquote>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-17272116307866982832024-03-16T13:35:00.000-07:002024-03-16T13:35:16.964-07:00Kavolis (i)<br>
<p>
Vytautas Kavolis
<br>
<i>Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis</i>
<br>
(1968)
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[4] The most obvious, although excessively general, explanation of the societal universality of art is the assumption that <i>affective orientation</i> to the situation of action is one of the basic requisites for the successful functioning of the human society, and that art is a strategic means of fulfilling this need.
<p align=justify>
In the past, sociologists have been encumbered in their approach to art by inadequacies in their theory of the social functions of art.
</blockquote>
<p>
Or have they been
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
encumbered
</mark>
</blockquote>
<i>by</i>
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
their approach
</mark>,
</blockquote>
whereby everything must
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
function
</mark>
</blockquote>
in a rather narrow sense?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
One influential (though not universal) tendency has been to assume that the main function of art for its consumers is status enhancement. Hence art has come to be regarded by some, explicitly or implicitly, as functional mainly for groups possessing or aspiring to high status, and not for the society as a whole.
</blockquote>
<p>
This <i>is</i> an observable phenomenon, but as a <i>total</i> theory of art it is, as the author adds,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
partially valid but generally superficial
</mark>
.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
A more broadly based conception of the social functions of art views art either as a means of re-enforcing existing social conditions, by reflecting them and thereby confirming their legitimacy, or as an instrumentality for changing social conditions, by exposing strains and stresses or by transmitting new attitudes.
</blockquote>
<p>
Really there is nothing
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
broad
</mark>
about this, because it is still narrowly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
function</mark>al(ist).
<p>
It would be great, though, if some intensely function-minded sociologist would turn their methodological laser beam upon this question of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
instrumentality for changing social conditions
</mark>
. It would be nice to have some firmer ground on which to discuss this cherished conceit.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
While probably valid, this point of view has remained, with regard to artistic style, so general that it deserves to be characterized as an interpretive perspective rather than as a theory.
</blockquote>
<p>
So, basically it's wishcasting.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It has not succeeded in identifying, within a single theoretical scheme, the main types of socio-cultural conditions that affect art style, the range of style characteristics associated, cross-culturally and transhistorically, with each condition, the determinants of variation
<p align=justify>
[5]
<p align=justify>
within each range, and the sociophychological mechanisms involved.
</blockquote>
<p>
Perhaps
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it has not succeeded
</mark>
<br>
in doing
<br>
any of this
<br>
because
<br>
<i>all</i> of this
<br>
is impossible.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Since, with all its deficiencies, this conception appears to provide the most fruitful orientation for the sociological analysis of art, it will be adopted here.
</blockquote>
<p>
So, this
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
theory
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
in name only,
<br>
which is really more of
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an interpretive perspective
</mark>,
</blockquote>
<p>
and of which we can say
<br>
only
<br>
that it
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
has not succeeded
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
at several impossible tasks,
<br>
this "theory" nonetheless
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
appears to provide the most fruitful orientation
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
for the task at hand
<br>
??
<p>
Hence
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it will be adopted here
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
??
<p>
Gotta say, things are off to a rollicking start.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
But it needs to be elaborated into a systematic theory, with specific empirical content leading to, and ultimately deducible from, general theoretical principles.
</blockquote>
<p>
Actually I feel that this is precisely what needs <i>not</i> to happen.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The empirical evidence surveyed in this book suggests the comprehensive hypothesis that the main sociological function of artistic <i>style</i> is the shaping or emotional re-enforcement of general tendencies to perceive situations of action in certain structured ways.
</blockquote>
<p>
If anyone can explain to me what this means, please leave a comment.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
I have proposed elsewhere that artistic <i>content</i> has the function of helping man to develop an emotional involvement with the objects of his social and cultural environment and that the <i>creation</i> of art, by providing new symbolic foci of sociocultural integration, contributes to the reintegration of society after the disturbance of a relative equilibrium. ...
<!--
In these ways art is, actually or potentially, functional for the society as a whole, and its influence may be either conservative or innovative (or a mixture of both). Whatever its effects, they may be expected to be stronger on the artistically sensitized strata of individuals, who are frequently the high-ranking or the alienated.
-->
Since individuals sensitive to art are produced in all societies, but since not everyone in any particular society has this sensitivity, the need for art is a cross-cultural but not a psychological universal. This approach to the social functions of art has the advantage of suggesting that art, in its various aspects, has various social functions, and that, as a consequence, no single one of them can reasonably explain art in all of its manifestations.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<center>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a cross-cultural but not a psychological universal
</mark>
</center>
<p>
An interesting way of putting it. Rank and Becker, meanwhile, think there <i>is</i> a "psychological universal" implicated here, of which "the need for art" is merely one of myriad forms taken. That seems to me to lead more directly to better (and fewer) questions. It suggests also that any "social" function of art is <i>after the fact</i> of individual "psychological" need.
</p>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[18]
<!--
In search for the meaning of the linkages,
-->
...we might speculate that the early hunting-gathering economy made the first significant achievements in man's control over nature,...
<!--
for example the systematization of toolmaking. Such control signifies a revolutionary change in man's relationship to nature.
-->
The other two levels of economic development most signally linked with geometricism—the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions—are both clearly characterized by radical increases in man's control over nature. In contrast, both levels of economic development associated with naturalistic styles—the advanced hunting and urban-commercial stages—give indications of a stable, or only gradually improving, pragmatic adaptation to the environment, without revolutionary changes in man's conquest of nature.
<p align=justify>
This contrast suggests two general propositions: Any radically increased control over nature will be associated with tendencies toward geometricism in the visual arts. ...
<!--
The relationship can be explained by assuming that geometricism is a projection of a feeling of mastery over nature. (Geometricism is not simply an expression of a sense of alienation from nature, or from "life," as Rudolf Arnheim among others has suggested, since this style is even more characteristic of peasant than of industrial art.)
-->
Any pragmatic but only gradually improving adaptation to the natural environment, on the other hand, will be linked with tendencies toward naturalism in the visual arts. The linkage indicates that naturalism in art reflects a relatively static adaptation to nature.
<p align=justify>
Given these two propositions, three interpretations, not
<p align=justify>
[19]
<p align=justify>
mutually exclusive, of the causes of change in art style are possible. First, technological revolutions generate new attitudes in art-making and art-using groups, which are then projected in new styles. Second, changes in dominant value orientations that have already occurred in a society give an independent impetus both to technological revolution and to change in art style. Third, a change in style helps to modify attitudes toward nature and thus contributes to economic dynamism or stability.
<p align=justify>
<!--
It seems relatively unfruitful to search for exact temporal sequences of changes that have occurred in the very distant past.
-->
A finding that modern geometricism emerged concurrently with industrialism would support the second interpretation. In actuality, economic transformation began before the artistic change. ...
<!--
This pattern seems to support the first interpretation, but without necessarily invalidating the second.
-->
It may take longer for a general change in value orientations to affect the art-making than the economy-managing groups (though artists are frequently assumed to be particularly sensitive to, and their work the first indicator of, such changes). The immediate response of artists to the technological aspects of industrialization was largely one of vehement protest. This reaction, presumably, was one source of nineteenth-century romanticism. But when the general tendency toward increased control over the environment had had time to influence artists' subconscious motivations, geometricism, became artistically possible. ...
<!--
To the geometric artists, the style did not necessarily symbolize the industrial system; it reflected their own basic attitudes, however similar some of these attitudes may have become to those exhibited by the scientific and managerial groups.
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
I log all of this only to give an example of a genuinely <i>socio-determinist</i> orientation.
<p>
Along the way, we at least get some welcome contrarianism.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Though artists are frequently assumed to be particularly sensitive to, and their work the first indicator of, such changes
</mark>
in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
value orientations
</mark>
, nonetheless
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The immediate response of artists to the technological aspects of industrialization was largely one of vehement protest.
</mark>
That's fun. But I suspect it's just as spurious as the rest.
</p>
<p>
<br>
...
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[33] In the contemporary world, orientations toward authority and liberty in an individual artist may not correspond to the verbal statements that he chooses to make in the language of the ideological doctrines fashionable in his environment. Characteristics of style are likely to be correlated with politically relevant orientations implicit in the artist's general behavior, rather than with his explicit pronouncements on political matters.
</blockquote>
<p>
Yep!
<p>
<br><br>
About this
<blockquote>
non<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
correspond</mark>ence
</blockquote>
<p>
between
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
explicit pronouncements on political matters
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
and
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
politically relevant orientations implicit in the artist's general behavior
</mark>,
</blockquote>
<p>
can <i>this</i> be studied
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sociologically
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
?
<p>
Because unlike
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Determinants of Style
</mark>,
</blockquote>
<p>which Rank tells us are spurious,
<br>
<i>this</i>
<blockquote>
non<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
correspond</mark>ence
</blockquote>
<p>
between word and deed
<br><br>
<i>does</i> seem urgent and tractable
<br><br>
in precisely those two areas which Rank
<br><br>
(in <i>Psychology and the Soul</i>)
<br><br>
would refer us back to:
<br>
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 30%">
<i>
Paradoxical as it may sound, the false connections in our soul are the truly causal ones, for they are the "cause" of all the human reactions we observe and study in psychology. This dethrones psychology as self-knowledge and reestablishes ethics and epistemology in its place.
</i>
<br>
(p. 123, trans. Richter and Lieberman)
</p>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[63]
<p align=justify>
...
<p>
<i>
<font size=4>
Aristocratic Styles
</font>
</i>
<p align=justify>
The styles of the Western European aristocracy are described in the literature of art history as rigid, grandiose, pompous,...
<!--
solemn, resplendent, idealized, archaically severe, conventionalized, stereotyped, ostentatious, sensual, and whimsically imaginative.
-->
There are indications of two basic types of aristocratic style. On the one hand, the independent and militant feudal nobility is linked with the Romanesque, a formal, stereotyped, expressionistic, and emotionally intense style. On the other hand, mannerism, the Catholic baroque, and the rococo are associated with the courtly nobility—...
<!--
the rococo specifically with a declining and relatively functionless nobility.
-->
All of the "courtly" styles, to be sure—especially the rococo—have also appealed to the upper bourgeoisie. But since, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, particularly in the Catholic countries in which these styles flourished, the prosperous upper bourgeoisie tended to develop a cultural identification with the aristocracy, these styles, even when cultivated by a plutocracy, may be assumed to reflect a basically aristocratic predisposition.
<p align=justify>
The international Gothic of the fifteenth century may be regarded as the style of a feudal nobility that was becoming courtly and already exhibiting in its taste more of the pre-dispositions of the latter: a preference for a "sublimation of reality," "elegant refinement," "subtle and delicate drawing," and "tenderness."
<p align=justify>
[64]
<p align=justify>
In search of central tendencies, I tentatively hypothesize that the most universal characteristic of aristocratic art is its restraint on spontaneity. This trait may appeal to aristocratic taste because it suggests dignity or refinement, important qualities of the nobility's style of life.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Perhaps Vessel et al's <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259701393_Art_reaches_within_Aesthetic_experience_the_self_and_the_default_mode_network">Art Reaches Within</a> paper, e.g., points, finally, to the smoking gun vis-a-vis this seemingly too-facile nexus between personal, class and aesthetic
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
trait</mark>s. But that's "psychology," this is "sociology." There's "a difference in scale" here, as a socio-bro once explained it to me unsolicitedly.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Within this general pattern of restrained spontaneity two subtypes are distinguishable: The art of a self-assertive (relatively independent and instrumentally active) nobility tends to be characterized by rigid formalism superimposed upon intense emotionality. This style suggests a dominant social stratum with a high dynamic potential—most typically a nomadic or feudal aristocracy or a hereditary class of managers of both political and economic affairs.
<p align=justify>
The art of an apathetic (dependent and instrumentally functionless) nobility, on the other hand, exhibits an idealization of reality and a kind of lyrical sensuousness which lacks emotional intensity and may appear to be "artificially" refined. This style is suggestive of refinement without a capacity for initiating significant change. It is most likely to be preferred by urbanized or city-oriented aristocracies, particularly when the political and economic functions they formerly performed have been taken over by newly developed bureaucratic organizations.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Ok, here's an actual role for interpretation and criticism, albeit one we wish would never have arisen: in order for hypotheses such as the above to hold up, we need to examine the works in question for alternative interpretations. Does a work really, truly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
lack emotional intensity
</mark>
?
On what basis and in whose eyes can we be sure that it indeed
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
exhibits an idealization of reality
</mark>
? These "aesthetic concepts" are flying at us in swarms here, but what do they even mean?
<p>
Usually it's possible to "interpret" even the most turgid of "aristocratic" art in a few different ways. If so, then it becomes much harder to reverse engineer the <i>particular</i> "interpretation" which explains any given reception. We're stuck with a puddle where infinite ice cubes could once have been. But if not, if the rejoinder to this is that multiple intepretations are <i>not</i> in fact possible owing to some known "context" which must be accounted for at all times, then the enterprise has become circular, we had the answer the whole time, and everyone can go to lunch.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The two modes of artistic expression can be discerned in the aristocratic art of various cultures and historical periods, though not always in a "pure" form. In ancient Greece, the period of dominance of the nobility is associated with the "archaic style," which was "governed by a number of formal principles—above all the principles of frontality and symmetry, of cubic form." In its "elegant slenderness," contrasting with the "plebeian full-bodiedness" of later middle-class art, it was an expression of the aristocratic ideals "of self-
<p align=justify>
[65]
<p align=justify>
restraint, discipline, and moderation" and "of bodily and spiritual beauty." Thus rigidity and an idealization of reality (the latter regarded by Gehlen as a generic feature of aristocratic art) were its dominant characteristics. The archaic style combined traits associated with both types of nobility, but the "activistic" traits were strongest in the period during which the Greek nobility was fighting against royal power and establishing its own, about the middle of the seventh century B.C. Rigidity in art became less prominent as the middle class rose to power. The rigid archaic style definitely disappeared, however, only shortly before the establishment of a middle-class democracy in Athens in 510 B.C.
<p align=justify>
The "monstrously expressive" and stereotyped jewelry of the Germanic peoples during the <i>V:olkerwanderung</i> period was created, in its more impressive manifestations, for a self-assertive nobility, "the military caste," and is representative of the first type of aristocratic style. In many significant respects, the jewelry style was shaped by Scythian and Sarmatian traditions and was later revived in the Romanesque. The art of the ancient Near East, whose society "in varying degrees" approached feudalism, also belongs to this type. In comparison with Chinese works of art, the painting and sculpture of feudal Japan of the twelfth to nineteenth centuries more frequently exhibit characteristics suggestive of the first variant of aristocratic style.
<p align=justify>
"Chinese painting, Persian painting, and Moghul painting were court art, dignified and distinguished, and rarely lapsing into lack of restraint or decorum." These cases are, however, not identical. It may be more effective to conceptualize the Chinese upper class as a bureaucratic intelligentsia of "educated administrators" rather than as a courtly aristocracy,
<p align=justify>
[66]
<p align=justify>
and to consider it as in certain respects comparable to the modern upper-middle class. In any event, a more rigidly stylized artistic tradition can be discerned in the earlier, more feudalistic periods of Chinese history. Parallels to the Romanesque have also been observed in the best religious sculpture of China, that of the Wei period, when central authority had been disrupted by almost constant warfare.
<p align=justify>
The second type of aristocratic art, characteristic of the more apathetic, court-centered nobility, is most clearly represented in India, particularly in the Gupta and the Mughal empires. The Ajanta wallpaintings, "an art of great courts" (though apparently they were not produced under direct court patronage), are characterized by a "religious romanticism" and idealized sensuous beauty, by "elegant and florid execution." The works of the painters attached to the courts of the Rajput princes are "sensitive, reticent and tender."
<p align=justify>
What has been said of some eighteenth-century Rajput miniature painting—that it displays "a sophisticated combination of realism and lyric grace"—could equally well be said of European rococo art, and presumably for similar reasons. Conversely, characteristics of the rococo—"lustre and brilliance of surface effects," "delicacy and elegance of draughtsmanship," avoidance of "massiveness and rigidity"—do not seem misapplied to the Rajput. The painting produced under the patronage of the Mughal emperors, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, was "courtly and aristocratic . . . , realistic and romantic," with "a most brilliant . . . composition and warm colours." "Neither the Rajput States nor the Muslim regimes of Northern India were feudal." The aristocracy was a dependent one. As for the Mughal emperors, "the only aristocracy which they set up consisted of a few lucky individuals who managed to hold
-->
<p align=justify>
[67]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
and transmit for a few generations the grants of land obtained as rewards for service, often bigots, lackeys or panderers." Idealized realism and lyrical sensuousness are usually characteristic of Indian temple sculpture, created under the sponsorship of royalty and court nobility.
<p align=justify>
There are some indications of a similar style in Greek art shortly before 500 B.C., during a time when the declining aristocracy was being threatened by the rising middle class, but before the establishment of a middle-class hegemony. The main tradition of eighteenth-century English painting (as represented by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence) may also be assumed to express the taste of an apathetic nobility—while Hogarth represented the rising middle class.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Most of the surviving high art of the historic civilizations was created, insofar as class is concerned, primarily for aristocratic groups. It should therefore exhibit the traits of one or the other variant of aristocratic style, or some combination of both
</mark>
.
-->
<br>
<br>
<p>
<i>
<font size=4>
Peasant Styles
</font>
</i>
<p align=justify>
To traditional rural art have been attributed such characteristics as impersonality, homogeneity of style, simplicity, harmoniousness, rigidity, uniform monotony, symbolic abstraction, geometric stylization, and "decorative form and abstract beauty of line." An art critic has concluded that peasant art "shows surprising tendency towards abstraction—either towards geometric abstraction,...
<!--
as in the rugs of Finland, the embroidery of Rumania, the pottery of Peru
-->
; or towards a rhythmical stylization of naturalistic motives,...
<!--
as in the pottery of Central Europe, the carved wood-work of Polynesia, and the embroidery of Czechoslovakia. In many cases, for example, in the Greek Islands and Italy, both
-->
<p align=justify>
[68]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
tendencies go hand in hand. . . .
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Direct representational art of the type dear to the academic artist is almost unknown in peasant art
</mark>."
</blockquote>
<p>
<br>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
[116]
<h3>
<center>
10
<br>
🙛 🙙
<br>
IMAGES OF THE UNIVERSE
<br>
AND STYLES OF ART
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
<i>
<font size=4>
Theoretical Assumptions
</font>
</i>
<p align=justify>
As orientations toward the totality of the environment, images of the universe are not easily compressed into a neat dichotomy. For analytical purposes, however, two extreme positions along an attitudinal continuum may be identified.
<p align=justify>
One significant element of a harmonious image of the universe is a perception of the destructive principle as definitely subordinate to the constructive principle (or not distinguishable as a definite discordant element at all). A harmonious image of the universe is thus indicated by a weak sense of the power of evil. It can be identified by a relative lack of
<p align=justify>
[117]
<p align=justify>
fear of supernatural powers (or, in secular ideologies, of social forces of evil). Conversely, a disharmonious image of the universe is apt to contain a perception of the destructive principle as largely independent and extremely powerful, capable of challenging the constructive principle in a contest with an uncertain outcome. An image of cosmic disharmony is thus indicated by a powerful sense of evil and can be identified by an intense fear of supernatural powers (or of their equivalents in secular ideologies).
<p align=justify>
It may be assumed that a perception of the universe as essentially harmonious is likely to produce an attitude of acceptance of its nature and of confidence in the predictability of relationships among its objects. Such an attitude should be reflected in reality-imitating, or "naturistic," art styles. ...
<!--
I label as naturistic those styles in which the forms of nature are imitated; such forms may be idealized by exaggeration of certain of their aspects, but they are not totally eliminated or forced into patterns inherently alien to the real forms taken as models. Reality-imitating styles have, indeed, been linked by an art historian with "a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world." From another direction, this hypothesis is supported by psychological studies, which have demonstrated that, at least in contemporary American society, a preference for reality-imitating styles tends to be associated with "good adjustment."
-->
<p align=justify>
Conversely, the image of a disharmonious universe seems likely to generate anxiety regarding man's relationship with his surroundings. The image will presumably be reflected in art styles suggestive of emotional distress experienced in relation to objects of the environment. It is assumed that deformation (that is, the forcing of forms of nature into patterns
<p align=justify>
[118]
<p align=justify>
inherently alien to them) or the abandonment of observable reality may carry the suggestion of the anxiety that is focused in such objects as have been deformed or abandoned. ...
<!--
Again the hypothesis can be supported from two directions. The "urge to abstraction" has been associated by the art historian with "a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world." And psychological research suggests that, in contemporary American society, "a preference for abstract painting is related to general neuroticism." Psychotics too, "even in the attempt to reestablish relations with reality by making an intelligible picture" fail "to achieve anything like realistic representation." A tendency toward distortion may, however, be associated with less extreme degrees of maladjustment: with the "avowal of such traits as being gloomy, pessimistic, bitter, [and] dissatisfied."
-->
Since pure—that is, nonobjective—abstraction is an almost uniquely modern phenomenon, in order to formulate a hypothesis applicable to the artistic traditions of all times, we assume the more general tendency toward deformation of visible reality to constitute the artistic expression of a sense of cosmic disharmony.
<p align=justify>
Although orientations toward the universe are regarded as basically preconscious states of mind, it is assumed that religious or secular ideological doctrines prevalent in a given epoch provide a clue to these states of mind, without necessarily constituting empirically exact conceptualizations of them. Therefore, much of the evidence on orientations toward the universe to be used here is derived, inferentially, from religious doctrines and attitudes popular in the strata that have created or used art in the various societies considered.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
This is all laid out so painstakingly and "responsibly," but the last bit in particular I think is just too loose.
<p>
Previously we're told that
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In the contemporary world,
<br>
orientations toward authority and liberty
<br>
in an individual artist
<br>
may not correspond to the verbal statements
<br>
that he chooses to make
<br>
in the language of the ideological doctrines
<br>
fashionable in his environment.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
If we've seen this firsthand as well as reading it in books, that ought to be enough to warn us off of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deriv</mark>ing<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
,
inferentially, from religious doctrines and attitudes
</mark>
any direct analogs between said "attitudes" and any aesthetic tendencies.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[119]
<p align=justify>
<i>
<font size=4>
A Cross-Cultural and Historical Explanation
</font>
</i>
<p align=justify>
As our hypothesis suggests, the civilizations which seem to have had, relatively speaking, the most harmonious views of the universe—the classical Greek and the Chinese (since the Han dynasty)—did in fact have artistic traditions characterized by a strong tendency to imitate nature.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Voila!
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
If the artistic traditions of classical Greece are compared with the Byzantine, the Egyptian with the Mesopotamian, and the postmedieval Catholic with the Russian Orthodox, in each case a stronger sense of cosmic disharmony is associated with a tendency toward artistic deformation. Among the ancient American civilizations, both preoccupation with evil and the element of distortion appear to have been most pronounced in the Aztec culture. In contrast, the basic tendencies toward naturism in the art of India may reflect a conception of a "divine . . . soul of the universe" which, on the one hand, could not be challenged by evil forces and, on the other, did not threaten "mankind with eternal torment." The sense of evil is also weak in the Chinese and Japanese civilizations, which have had a predominantly naturistic art tradition since roughly the third century B.C. (the Han Dynasty) and the sixth century A.D. (the Asuka period), respectively. The Japanese, however, seem to have a stronger sense of evil than the Chinese, and there is more expressionistic deformation in depictions of real-life subject matter in Japanese than in Chinese art.
<p align=justify>
If it can be assumed that a more disharmonious image of the universe will be linked, through the nexus of psychological congruence, with a stress on the awe-inspiring rather than the compassionate aspects of religion, one may expect
-->
<p align=justify>
[120]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
a historical correlation between the awe-inspiring religions and deformation in art style. According to Wach, "The moment of tremendum dominates, . . . especially in the African and Melanesian, the Aztec, Tibetan, and Assyrian religions," while the fascinosum "plays a large role in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity," particularly "since the period of the Enlightenment." And indeed, "the African, Melanesian, Maori, Marquesan, Kwakiutl, Maya or Inca artist distorted his figures intentionally. ... As regards certain African, Melanesian and medieval gargoyle carving artists, their nightmare vision of the human body—reflected in artistic distortion—is closely related to what I, for one, view as their nightmare vision of the universe and of life."
-->
Deformation does tend to be associated with the awe-inspiring, and naturism with the compassionate in religion. (While this hypothesis is not applicable to the secular art of the Puritans, New England tombstones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveal that where the Puritans were not under the influence of European models, they tended spontaneously to evolve a highly distorted—geometricizing—style).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
That is at least interesting!
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The dynamic nature of the linkage between orientations toward the universe and art style can be demonstrated in the development of the Western Christian tradition of art. The Romanesque artist, a "man of fear and trembling," employed a style marked by considerable deformation. The element of naturism increased as "Gothic man" found "his way ... to cosmic harmony." The "reconciliation with God" in the Renaissance is associated with further advances toward naturism. Classical naturalism is linked with the decline of the "threat of hell-fire";...
<!--
it did not become prevalent in Spain, where this threat has remained strong. Instead, the Spaniards surpassed all other Europeans in the creation
-->
<p align=justify>
[121]
<p align=justify>
<!--
of grotesque art. In the West, the Romanesque monster reappeared in Bosch (ca. 1450-1516). The mannerism of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era developed a tendency toward deformation of reality, a characteristic of the art of periods of spiritual crisis. Thus
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...trends toward a disharmonious world view within the Christian tradition appear to be associated with deformation in the visual arts, and trends toward a more harmonious view of the universe to be linked with artistic naturism. Similar relationships are apparent, at least in certain periods, also in China and in classical Greece.
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The relatively optimistic world view of the rationalistic seventeenth century is associated with a return to naturalism in art...
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(which cannot be explained by the influence of science on artistic expression, since science in general looks for not immediately apparent structures underlying visual appearances, and since seventeenth-century leaders of scientific thought in particular subscribed to conventions of idealized realism in artistic expression).
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The basically harmonious universe of the French Enlightenment is linked with a preference for realistic classicism. On the other hand, the deformation in contemporary art may be assumed to reflect the more intense perception of disharmony which is a part of the modern temper. ...
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Such deformation is historically associated with the emergence of secular ideological systems that can be felt to be dualistic.
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In preliterate cultures, naturism seems in general to be associated with mature hunting-gathering societies, while a more geometric style is favored by the agricultural societies. But there are ranges of variation at each level. Among the hunting-gathering peoples, the European cave-dwellers approached most closely a naturistic style, the Australians and
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[122]
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the Eskimos less so. ...
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One of the most advanced preagricultural peoples, the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast of America, together with their neighbors, evolved a highly deformed style, although they were capable of realistic representation also. The element of deformation increased in European art during the transition to the agricultural Neolithic.
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<p align=justify>
If our interpretation of artistic deformation is valid, an increasingly disharmonious view of the universe may have been associated with, or perhaps have preceded, the Agricultural Revolution. This interpretation is supported by Radin's somewhat overgeneralized observation that "it is only after the simple methods of food production and their social concomitants have changed that a real fear of the supernatural emerges." ...
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Possible reasons for the linkage between the Agricultural Revolution and a more disharmonious image of the universe are the greater power and potential oppressiveness of the agricultural society, which, according to Durkheim, may be projected into the conception of the "terrible and jealous gods."
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An increase in the sense of cosmic disharmony seems, however, to be associated with the agricultural transition and its preparatory phases, rather than with the agricultural type of society as such. Among artistically active agricultural societies, the Zuni, for example, have a particularly low index of supernatural fear.
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To be sure, conforming to the geometricizing tendency of agricultural peoples,
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...they deform reality in their artistic representations, but they deform less intensively, with a less expressionistic effect, than do the Kwakiutl. Deformation is of far less significance in European peasant art than in the carvings of African or Melanesian agriculturists. ...
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It may be possible to distinguish between regular geometricism, an indication of a feeling of mastery over nature, and "expressionistic" distortion of rep-
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[123]
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...
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resentational subject matter, the "pure" indicator of a disharmonious image of the universe.
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<p align=justify>
A tendency toward deformation is also associated with the Industrial Revolution.
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As an element of popular caricature (which appeared as a genre during the Reformation period), deformation preceded the industrial transition. Expressionistic and geometrical deformation in high art became prevalent with the establishment of the foundations of the industrial order (though earlier in the industrial-transition cycle in Italy and Russia than in Great Britain or the United States). Thus -->
...tendencies toward deformation in art are linked with both of the main economic transformations of society. This suggests, if our interpretation is valid, that radical economic advances either require or cause the emergence of more disharmonious perceptions of the universe.
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...
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No quantitative test of our basic hypothesis has been performed with anthropological materials, but an incidental observation may be cited: Frazer's survey of attitudes toward immortality suggests that the spirits of the dead have been regarded as more benevolent in the southern than in the other parts of Melanesia, and the "southern forms" of Melanesian masks are described by an authority on primitive art as "less grotesquely stylized than those of the central and
northern areas."
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</blockquote>
<p>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
[126]
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...
<br><br>
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<i>
<font size=4>
Functional Interpretation
</font>
</i>
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...it may be tentatively suggested that the qualities of a religious orientation are projected in art style because such projections have pragmatic utility for both the individual personality and the cultural
system.
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For the personality (of the artist as well as of the emotionally involved art consumer), artistic projection may satisfy a hypothesized general need to give a tangible structure to one's emotional perception of the universe. By externalizing such feelings, one increases one's capacity to impose some degree of conscious control over them. Art style, to the extent to which it corresponds to underlying emotional orientations, then has the psychological function of contributing to the
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[127]
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explication and "rationalization" of the subconscious in the
interest of increasing ego control.
<p align=justify>
As for religion specifically, artistic projection may satisfy the need to develop an emotional relationship to the abstractions which the religious concepts would be in the absence of their artistic visualization. This need may be satisfied, consciously, by the content of religious art, and, more subconsciously, by artistic style. On both levels, art seems to perform the function of vitalizing and strengthening the sense of emotional relatedness to the intangible objects of religious commitment. In the absence of the aesthetic as a component of religious orientation, a religion is apt to be experienced as psychologically constricting and ego-alien; it fails to include one of the most intimate elements of any act of commitment. On the other hand, a strong sense of emotional orientation, developed by art (or by other means), may contribute to the emergence of religious conceptions and may indeed be one generic source of religion itself.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
[162]
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...
<br>
<br>
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<i>
<font size=4>
Methodological Comments
</font>
</i>
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One of the basic assumptions of the value-orientation theory is that all possible orientations are present, but to varying degrees, in all societies at all times. Hence, any complex artistic tradition or personality is potentially capable of using all distinguishable elements of artistic style. Value orientations merely create tendencies to favor particular stylistic characteristics, which are combined with other tendencies—some of them apparently caused by sociological factors—to form a style. Since similar tendencies may appear in different sociocultural contexts, they will emerge in diverse stylistic configurations, so that no specific historical style can be considered as a "pure" and "complete" expression of a value orientation (or of any other sociocultural variable, such as social class).
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...
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An art style may also reflect one set of value orientations in some of its formal characteristics, and a different set in others. This discrepancy seems particularly likely when different sets of value orientations are held by important components of the artists' public, or when some of the artists' own values differ from those of their public. In such cases, artists
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[163]
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...
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may tend to evolve styles that synthesize mutually inconsistent value orientations by combining, for example, forms expressive of a Doing orientation with colors suggestive of a Being orientation. This situation, however, seems to occur mainly in advanced urban civilizations. Styles that do not become popular at (or soon after) the time of their creation cannot, of course, be assumed to reflect dominant value orientations. In complex civilizations, even popular styles may project the value orientations of their public only—and not those dominant in the civilization as a whole.
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In cross-cultural studies, the present theory should be adjusted to the limiting condition that certain characteristics of style (e.g., the depth dimension or particular colors) do not exist as technically realizable alternatives in some cultural traditions. In such cases, it is not possible, without independent sources of information, to infer with any degree of certainty that the value orientations presumably linked with the "missing" traits are also absent. ...
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Conversely, "the reliance on certain universal materials . . . induces certain universal or widespread solutions; a human figure executed within a basket design is inevitably composed by using triangles, rectangles, straight or diagonal lines."
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When techniques determine the forms of expression, analytical inferences must be made, holding the techniques as constant as possible. However, the preference for a particular technique when alternatives are available may in itself be significant as a clue to value orientations. ...
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Thus, "woodcut cultures" might be expected to have more Lineal, and "watercolor cultures" more Individualistic values. In certain historical periods, Germany may profitably be compared with England in these
terms.
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[164]
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The spontaneous expression of value orientations in artistic style is likely to be circumscribed (i.e., forced into a conventional idiom) by the artistic traditions institutionalized in a culture, which may reflect an earlier value-orientation profile. It seems possible that, for this or other reasons, different cultures may prefer alternative ways of expressing similar value orientations in artistic style.
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</blockquote>
<p>
Cool. So, uh...when's lunch?
</p>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-26060587153918653142024-03-15T13:25:00.000-07:002024-03-16T13:25:31.327-07:00Ericsson and Pool—Peak<br>
<p>
Ericsson and Pool
<br>
<i>Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise</i>
<br>
(2016)
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
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[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...
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[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-
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[13]
<p align=justify>
ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...
<p align=justify>
But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
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[40] This is how the body's desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. ... [And then,] It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante...
<p align=justify>
This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body's compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
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This, at least, is the way the body responds to physical activity. Scientists know much less about how the brain changes in response to mental challenges.
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...
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[41] Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.
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...
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[45] developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases
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[46]
<p align=justify>
people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area. Maguire's study of the London taxi drivers provides perhaps the best example. At the end of the four years, when the trainees had either finished the course and become licensed drivers or had stopped trying, she tested her subjects' memory in two ways. One involved knowing the locations of various London landmarks, and at this the subjects who had become licensed drivers did far better than the rest of the subjects. The second was a standard test of spatial memory...and on this the licensed drivers did much worse than the group who had never been trained to become taxi drivers. By contrast, the trainees who had dropped out scored about the same as the subjects who had never trained. Because all three groups scored equally well on this memory test at the start of the four-year period, the only explanation was that the licensed cabbies, by developing their memories of London streets, had done something to cause a decline in this other sort of memory. Although we don't know for sure what caused that, it seems likely that the intense training causes the trainees' brains to devote an increasingly large segment to this sort of memory, leaving less gray matter to devote to other sorts of memory."
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
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[60] A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very "domain specific," that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player's mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver's mental representations will be useless for basketball.
<p align=justify>
This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don't train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people's faces. You don't train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player.
</blockquote>
<p>
The impossibility of "general skills" would seem to torpedo my former youthful ideal of "style-neutral pedagogy." It is likewise a challenge to washed-up jocks who rail against today's regime of early specialization and insist that playing many sports growing up was important in making them successful at the one sport they ended up playing professionally.
<p>
Taleb administers the truth serum:
<blockquote>
<i>
The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.
</i>
</blockquote>
<p>
And again:
<blockquote>
<i>
The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires.
</i>
<br><br>
(<i>Black Swan</i>, p. 105)
</blockquote>
<p>
Perhaps the sports "graveyard" is also full of multi-sport athletes. And, per Ericsson, perhaps these jock-commentators are underselling their later intensive training in a specialty. This all may be closer to the truth. Unfortunately, none of it really makes the current social and cultural regime of hyperspecialization any easier to justify. I'll come clean and invite the jocks to cosign: perhaps the recourse to a "general skills" hypothesis is merely a rationalization rather than a critique. It is a reaction against so much that is obviously wrong, but it itself is also wrong. If so, then we can safely dispense with it.
<p>
Having issued that <i>mea culpa</i>, I confess that I usually am unconvinced by these high-level, popularized accounts. It seems they always leave room for more granular skepticism. Start here: ear-training, e.g., is a general skill in music and a specialized skill in the grand scheme. The way ear-training was taught even in so specialized and airless an undergrad program as the one I attended was, as few of us failed to notice, a far cry from any of the settings to which we were expected to ultimately apply it. At a certain point, you must take your (specialized) place and see how it goes.
<p>
Incidentally, this is why the assertion that
<blockquote>
If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five
</blockquote>
<p>
also rings a bit hollow. There is no training that that is "specialized" enough to merge theory with practice; and at that point, the acclimation to practice is, functionally if not spiritually, a type of skills improvement.
<p>
Where I have worked for the past several years, this is indeed the outlook, and it seems to me something more than a mere rationalization. One of our finest players claims to have developed on-the-job rather than in the practice room, and unlike the jocks, in his case let's just say that life history, verbal statements, and observable behavior alike make this is a very believable story. What could account for this?
<p>
I remember where and when I was told for the first and only time by a representative of the college I had enrolled in that ensemble rehearsal time was not to be counted as "practice" time. Oddly enough, this rang truer for me in the school environment than it has in the "professional" one. I didn't get much of any benefit from rehearsing difficult music a few times and then giving one performance of it; but playing the same simple music thousands of times with the same players in the same setting has been the only thing that has pushed me past my post-college stagnation phase. The reasons for this actually comport perfectly with Ericsson's account. The missing factors are also the same ones missing from much of this book: quality is often subjective; no skill is ever perfected; motivation comes and goes.
<p>
Even for my bandmate, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, the "want" to sound good is not the same kind of "want" as wanting a large family or a hamburger. He often seems not to care how he sounds, whereas I am more immediately buoyed by sounding good and crushed by sounding bad. Nonetheless, we both <i>notice</i> acutely; often we notice different things, but with the same (unusual) acuity. I am by far the more anxious to improve, but he has been at it four times as long as I have and he notices everything. Thus he has gotten really, really good, so good that even in his utterly apathetic pre-tired state his "expert performance" is "noticed" by all.
<p>
Given such a contradiction between consciously-stated attitudes and observable behavior, it makes sense to consider the environment. For one thing, playing the same simple songs in the same venue for years makes you hyperaware of your own (and others'!) shortcomings. Because the baseline task is simple enough and because it is repeated thousands of times, perhaps you begin to make small fixes without thinking too hard about it. In our case, we also have the privilege of hearing <i>each other</i> play, day after day, for years (in his case for decades). You would have to be exceptionally jaded <i>not</i> to crib a few things here and there; and again, with simple material you aren't precluded from doing so by your own shortcomings. In Ericsson's terms, we have never actually "automated our performance," even though this "automated" quality is axiomatic of the job we do. (As one of our seasonal compadres says, we "make music by the pound.")
<p>
Musical performance can be monotonous when unvaried. There's no doubt about that. But musicians aren't the "automating" type. Even musicians who seemingly fell into the profession rather than chasing after it, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, even these musicians, I am left to conclude, are not the "automating" type. Of course I hear the same stories you do about tenured symphony players and academics who can barely play by the time they retire; and I hear stories about twenty year-olds winning significant auditions; but with my own eyes and ears mostly I find that older players have physically declined only slightly while they have learned and consolodated tremendously.
<p>
In these respects, the central place of music in so many popularized accounts of expert performance is actually quite inapt and unfortunate. Music seems to me an exceptionally poor (because confounded) lens through which to seek laboratory results. That could be because music itself is an "art" rather than a "science," but I fear it's actually because I know so much more about music than I do about, say, athletics or medicine.
<p>
(I also know that E&P's account of Scrabble player Nigel Richards is not quite right. Nigel's <i>word knowledge</i> is what first strikes a newb, but what fellow players really marvel at is his <i>analytic ability</i>, an ability which is so deep and unique that other grandmasters occasionally have trouble explaining or even discerning his thought-process in a given position. I know a lot of words and I'm just a potzer-expert. It's not hard to explain where the words come from. Nigel's purported photographic memory certainly is remarkable in its own right, but by itself it wouldn't get him very far. The reasons why are very hard to explain to a living-room Scrabble player, just like my sixty-something bandmate is hard to explain to a laboratory researcher. Anyway, to reiterate, it's suspicious how much more correct the book seems when it is discussing something I don't know anything about.)
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<p>
Researchers in this area study what is able to be studied. As far as this goes I find <i>Peak</i> quite insightful and would unflinchingly recommend it to students and colleagues within my orbit. Who would I discourage from reading it? Anyone and everyone who would read "truly great piece of music" without noticing that anything has gone awry.
I suspect the "graveyard" caveat very much applies to Ericsson's general conclusions about human potential. It's not clear that he has looked for or would know where to find the "grinders" who toil without great improvement. When I mention this to fellow musicians, their response is usually something like, "They should have done that study at [school I attended]." All of that being as it is, the "general skills" comment
We may choose to get bogged down in questioning what "truly great" might mean and how on earth a respectable academic is allowed to just toss off such a statement as if it were not as loaded as it actually is. Admittedly, some of us afflicted with "the permanent adolescence of creative minds" never tire of declaiming our adolescent outrage over such things. For now, for my purposes here, all of that is inessential. I am more interested in considering the Mediocristan/Extremistan distinction.
<p>
And so, perhaps you don't train to become a tuba player, nor even to become a musician who happens to play tuba, but rather to become an orchestral, chamber, jazz, or experimental tuba player. This, at least, is the case if you are aiming to be the <i>best in the world</i> at these things, to be perceptibly and non-negligibly better than the competition according to some style-bound objective standard.
The division of labor between, say, high and low orchestral hornists does seem to reflect the impossibility of "general skills." Yet even among conservatory brats not everyone actually has personal tastes as narrow as the conservatory curriculum.
And now in Talebian terms: lead trumpet is from Mediocristan, jazz trumpet is from Extremistan. Finally, in Floridian terms: millennials don't seem to care as much as their parents used to that Mediocristan offers stabler incomes.
The areas of music where it is not absurd to talk about "expertise" are areas which indeed have more in common with memory competitions and track meets. Elsewhere Ericsson cites a study of composers which indicated that it takes decades, not years, to produce "a truly great piece of music." This of course is a distinctively Mediocristani way of looking at things.
<p>
many sporting tykes simply won't be happy as hyperspecialists, just as I, as a somewhat overgrown tyke, couldn't quite justify the amount of Schubert I was being required to analyze as an undergraduate tuba major. I suppose that, like the jocks, this personal retrospective angle and not anything more broadly scientific is the real root of my fixation on this problem. If I had gone to CalArts instead of the U of MN at age 18, perhaps I would have emerged railing about how educators must nudge their students towards a specialty, lest everyone end up wandering in the wilderness with only a false belief in "general skills" to guide them. Or, perhaps nature trumps nurture here and I would have gotten where I'm going regardless.
<p>
The idea of "craftsmanship" per se being definitionally not covered by the notion of "meritocracy" is quite striking. But is the difference here really one of "potential ability" versus manifested ability? There is another important difference: "potential" anything is abstract while manifested anything is concrete.
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<hr>
<p>
In my particular college situation, we were assumed to be specialists without necessarily having had the chance to figure out what we really wanted. Time taken to find oneself is necessary for long-term adjustment, health, and for intrinsic fulfillment, but it works <i>against</i> professional success and social status, which are hypersensitive to anti-meritocratic warps like accumulative advantage and Kahnemanian distortions of judgment. Patience sets us back professionally once we are being compared with specialists who have already banked thousands of specialist-hours. Patience is a virtue only in the retrospective abstract, or maybe in Extremistan; functionally it is downright maladaptive for today's young people. It has been said (I know not with what justification) that even pro sports, the last preserve of innate ability and advantage, have begun to favor those with the most early specialist training. The era of the streetballer is over. You used to get <i>better</i> training playing streetball; as a mere child you played against grown-ups as soon as you had the courage to get out there with them; you either got assaulted or did the assaulting. But now the cultivated training programs have caught up with and surpassed the streetball method. The sudden inability of athletically superior American basketball players to consistently beat more highly-trained European players is attributable to this. So my sources tell me.
<p>
This individual dilemma is mirrored at mass scale. If there are no general skills, then decisions about what to teach to whom promise to defy conclusive democratic resolution. Best of luck to everybody!
<hr>
<p>
Ericsson insists that no one is born a peak performer. Is it more plausible that as a matter of affinity there <i>are</i> born specialists and generalists? (By "born" let's include early influences/happenstances which are out of baby's control.) What he says later about "deliberate practice" not being fun for the practicer is hard for me to accept at face value. Ditto the dreaded invocation of "sacrifice" (255). For me the period of conservatory regimen was indeed not much fun, much as the subjects in his study reported, but it was not pure torture either. I wonder if "delayed gratification," that old warhorse, does not sum it up better, by which I mean that there is plenty of expectation of a later payoff. No, this is not "fun," but it is a mindset that keeps people going. I would caucus with the behavioral economists on this one and argue that <i>something</i> has to be keeping people going. Rank and Becker had a somewhat different "existential" gloss on this, but with the same bottom line. In the highly reductive, popularized account offered in <i>Peak</i>, meanwhile, there does not seem to be much of anything of this kind. Perhaps it is too obvious a point for him to have begun with to say that people must actually like the thing they are practicing if they are to improve at it. I think that by omitting it he has, rather, shown that it cannot be omitted. You can be having all the "fun" in the world yet without some such larger purpose be nonetheless on the edge of despair. Current events have driven that point home for good.
<p>
Perhaps the rare born specialists among us are bound to win the meritocracy, and perhaps at a population scale of billions the law of large numbers ensures there will enough of them to pretty much rule the world. And perhaps that's why the highest status performers in sports and music are only rarely the most entertaining.
<p>
And of course, consider Sennett (<i>The Culture of the New Capitalism</i>):
<blockquote>
<i>
Practically, in the modern economy, the shelf-life of many skills is short; in technology and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing, workers now need to retrain on average every eight to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement. ...
</i>
<br><br>
[Another] <i>challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How
<br>
</i>[5]<i>
<br>
could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly servicable goods, rather than the owner who jealously guards what he or she already possesses. ...
<br><br>
"Skills extinction" has sped up not only in technical work, but in medicine, law, and various crafts. One estimate for computer repairmen is that they have to relearn their skills three times in the course of their working lifetimes; the figure is about the same for doctors. That is, when you acquire a skill, you don't have a durable possession."
</i>
<br>
(pp. 4-5)
<br><br><br><br>
<i>
In those firms which do abandon the structures of social capitalism, the personal consequence of focusing on young talent is that as experience increases it has less value. I found in my interviewing that this slighting of experience was notably strong among consultants, who have a professional interest in thinking so.
</i>
<br>
(p. 97)
<br><br><br><br>
<i>
Skills extinction is a durable feature of technological advance.
</i>
<br>
(p. 98)
<br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<p>
<!--
<h5>[[this looks like it comes from Sasaki???]]</h5>
During the time I spent hanging out on Expert Corner I indeed got very swept up in the notion of becoming one of the best in the world. Philosophically and intellectually I am happy to have left that conceit behind, but I confess that I've found most of the more humane, humanistic encouragements young people receive about this to be false: I have not landed among the stars, the fish which remain in the sea are the ones that have been thrown back, and it is weak social ties rather than strong ones that generate business leads.
I fear that accounts such as this contribute to a certain narrowing of perspective on what music has been and could be. If Ericsson has, by his own admission, taken a notably optimistic view of human potential, he has also presented only applications which comport with that view.
-->
<br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[112] The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn't say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice."
</blockquote>
<p>
No, Gladwell did not "say" this explicitly, but you'd have to be a real bonehead not to pick up on this subtext. This was rather irresponsible of him, I think, (but good for the bottom line!) given the clear caveats which apply. Frankly, much of <i>Peak</i> is wrapped in similar subtextual optimism, all while being very careful not to "say" anything whose literal meaning is unsupportable.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best music students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.
</blockquote>
<p>
Indeed, take a quick mental inventory of all the obstacles (the practical ones, and also the logical/rhetorical ones) to conducting a study which "put[s] a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin." Ericsson's subjects had already self-selected. That self-selection is a much more interesting and urgent topic for research, and probably it is not nearly as susceptible to <i>any</i> kind of study as is "expertise."
<p>
On the next page [113], Ericsson's measured optimism reappears:
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
When we say that it takes ten thousand—or however many—hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. ...
<p align=justify>
But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement...but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.
<p align=justify>
This puts the ten-thousand hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world's best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.
</blockquote>
<p>
So, the rule of deliberate practice comes with no fixed prescription of quantity, but only one of quality. In competitive pursuits, the bar is set by one's competition; otherwise, it is up to us ourselves where we want to set the bar based on our own wants and needs.
<p>
Of course when we tie our goals to the external moving target of competition with others, we forfeit a certain amount of self-determination. Here again is an affinity that is not for everyone. I am not so sure that it leads ineluctably to social dysfunction, but certainly it is unsightly, it can be unpleasant to be around, etc. In this connection the "mediocore" perspective at least makes a little bit of sense to me. The problem is that even the quite modest, humane achievement of "a few hundred hours" of deliberate practice is plenty sufficient to form the basis of invidious comparison. It is certainly enough to alienate peers and to bring plenty of third-hand quotes from Marx streaming into your comments section.
<br><br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[131] When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
</blockquote>
<p>
Indeed, and as band teachers and studio teachers know (or they should), simply conveying to the student the "knowledge" of how to set up such conditions for themselves, somewhere outside of school and outside the school day, and then sending them off to go make it happen, doesn't work at all, not when pretty much the entire social and material world outside of school is pushing in the opposite direction.
</p>
<br><br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[154] Any activity at the limits of your ability will require full concentration and effort. ...
<p align=justify>
Maintaining this sort of focus is hard work, however, even for experts who have been doing it for years. ...the violin students I studied at the Berlin academy found their training so tiring that they would often take a midday nap between their morning and afternoon practice sessions. People who are just learning to focus on their practice won't be able to maintain it for several hours. Instead, they'll need to start out with much shorter sessions and gradually work up.
<p align=justify>
...Focus and concentration are crucial...so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[159] To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[164] Tests on the best typists have shown that their speeds are closely related to how far ahead they look at upcoming letters while they type.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[166] Some people had suggested that the students [spelling bee contestants] who had spent the most time practicing did so because they actually liked this sort of studying and got some sort of pleasure out of it. But the answers students gave to our questionaire told a very different story: they didn't like studying at all. None of them did, including the very best spellers. The hours they had spent studying thousands of words alone were not fun; they would have been quite happy to do something else. Instead, what distinguished the most successful spellers was their superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other, more appealing activites."
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, okay. Can we ask some <i>adults</i> sometime?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[167] there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general "willpower" that can be applied in any situation. ...
<p align=justify>
[168] ...if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute.
</blockquote>
<p>
For sure. But kids haven't chosen their situation. If you've broken loose of school and have your wits about you, then you can chase "situations" where you've already noticed you tend to have "willpower." Or you can "choose" to pound pills and watch porn; that's why the adults tried to lock you up for as long as it was legal to do so. It's a double-edged sword.
<p>
Once we establish that "willpower is a very situation-specific attribute," we then want to know the reasons for people's different choices of "situation." Now we are chasing a new set of psychological correlates, and then another, and another, until eventually we either run out of new places to look or end up back where we started.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[171] Runners and other athletes find that they become inured to the pain associated with their exercise. Interestingly, studies have found that while athletes get acclimated to the particular type of pain associated with their sport, they do not get acclimated to pain in general. They still feel other types of pain just as acutely as anyone else does. Similarly, over time musicians and anyone else who practices intensely get to the point where those hours of practice no longer seem as mentally painful as they once were. The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it's not as hard to keep going.
</blockquote>
That's funny. My vibe is quite the opposite: practice was so much fun at first that it was all I wanted to do, then it gradually became boring, and now it's torture. Maybe I'm more normal than I thought.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[172] Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends' compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.
<p align=justify>
Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don't feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality. [gives example of Swedish runner whose father lied to him about his time (on the low side) as a young teen, and who thereby gathered motivation]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[173] One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[174] One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritze their practice.
</blockquote>
<p>
Since when did other music students offer this kind of "understanding" to each other?! Let me know where I can find these people if they exist.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Perhaps the most important factor here...is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions...you have a built-in support system.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[188] Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn't introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general.
<br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[232] Of course, the abilities measured by IQ tests do seem to play a role
<p align=justify>
[233]
<p align=justify>
early on, and it seems that children with higher IQs will play chess more capably in the beginning. But what Bilalić and his colleagues found was that among the children who played in chess tournaments—that is, the chess players who were devoted enough to the game to take it a level beyond playing in their school chess club—there was a tendency for the ones with lower IQs to have engaged in more practice. We don't know why, but we can speculate: All of these elite players were committed to chess, and in the beginning the ones with higher IQs had a somewhat easier time developing their ability. The others, in an effort to keep up, practiced more, and having developed the habit of practicing more, they actually went on to become better players than the ones with higher IQs, who initially didn't feel the same pressure to keep up.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[236] If there are indeed genetic dif-
<p align=justify>
[237]
<p align=justify>
ferences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs (beyond the initial stages when someone is just learning a skill), they aren't likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly—a "music gene" or a "chess gene" or a "math gene." No, I suspect that such genetic differences—if they exist—are most likely to manifest themselves through the necessary practice and efforts that go into developing a skill.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[255] Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level—not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas. That is why experts in one field can often appreciate those in other fields. A research physicist may better understand what it takes to become a skilled violinist, if only in general terms, and a ballerina may better understand the sacrifice it takes to become a skilled painter.
<p align=justify>
Our schools should give all students such an experience in some domain. Only then will they understand what is possible and also what it takes to make it happen.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[257] we could produce a new world, one in which most people understand deliberate practice and use it to enrich their lives and their children's.
<p align=justify>
What kind of world would that be? To begin with, it would contain far more experts in far more fields than we have today. The societal implications of this would be enormous. Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people in these professions learn to perform at the level that only the top 5 percent manage today. What would that mean for our health care, our educational system, our technology?
<p align=justify>
The personal benefits could be tremendous as well. I have spoken very little of this here, but expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities."
</blockquote>
<p>
Sure. But good luck creating the social support network for all of these people to become experts. You can spread the gospel of deliberate practice all you want, but "social motivation" is a zero-sum game.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
p. 258--<i>Homo exercens</i>="practicing man"
</blockquote>
<p>
pp. 258-259—he finally draws the connection to the fast-changing employment landscape and the seeming need for adult workers to retrain. Deliberate practice saves the world! But his outlook seems too rosy, because one-sided. Previously he has identified the importance of social motivation, but now the reader wonders just how that part of the equation could ever be applied at mass scale, how it could be normalized/institutionalized, as he seems here to think is possible, desirable, and necessary.
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
Most of this was written a while ago. It has been touched up in places, sometimes substantially. As so often, it languished in the backlog for so long that things have moved on. Let us see just how far they have moved on...
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
Brooke N. Macnamara and Megha Maitra
<br>
<a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327">"The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993)"</a>
<br>
(2019)
</p>
<blockquote>
[2]
<p align=justify>
The impact of this article—which shifted the narrative about the origins of expertise away from any important role for genes or stable abilities and towards the importance of practice and training—is difficult to overstate. Cited over 9000 times (source: Google Scholar as of 12 November 2018), it is one of the most referenced articles in the psychological literature. ...
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
1.2.1. Magnitude of effects
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...at least in retrospect, Ericsson et al.’s <!--[1]--> finding that accumulated amount of deliberate practice differentiated even <i>experts</i> is surprising. ...finding differences in amounts of practice between novices and experts would be expected, but finding significant differences among three groups of experts of varying accomplishment is less expected. ...Macnamara <i>et al.</i> <!--[7]--> found that accumulated amount of deliberate practice significantly accounted for performance variance among sub-elite athletes...and athletes with a range of skill levels, but did not reliably differentiate among elite athletes...
</blockquote>
<p>
I've often had the (naive) thought that if innate differences were to emerge anywhere, it would be most clearly among
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
experts
</mark>
who have all maxed out their
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deliberate practice
</mark>
; this can redeem certain rat-races of "skill acquisition" which otherwise seem pointless and anti-meritocratic.
<p>
As we'll see later, it has been questioned whether Scrabble, e.g., actually entails "deliberate practice" by any of the competing definitions. No one can question that performance benefits from "preparation" here as elsewhere, but indeed, Scrabble can often seem more like the agglomeration of a few distinct rote exercises rather than a body of "expertise." This can be deflating. The surface "beauty" of the game masks a quite uninteresting, unremarkable, unaesthetic underlying structure.
<p>
The redeeming quality, though, is in being a game of "imperfect information," and also a "variance game" as a chess-playing co-worker once remarked to me in a slightly contemptuous tone of voice. But this is where the depth and beauty of Scrabble <i>start</i>, not where they end. I suspect that they end here, rather, if you have not done all of the rote learning needed to equip yourself for the task. (To be sure, I have not.) In that case, it's merely "your word against mine" as the old pun goes; it's just roulette. But reading your opponent's plays as signals is equal parts art and science, as are "stylistic" choices between candidate plays of near-equivalent equity. Rote learning is unsightly and, for most people, boring, but it is the key which unlocks all of this "next-level" game theory.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The magnitude of the effect of deliberate practice reported by Ericsson <i>et al.</i> <!--[1]--> is also surprising. ...
<h4>
1.2.2. Potential bias
</h4>
<p align=justify>
Ericsson <i>et al.’s</i> <!--[1]--> method for collecting retrospective estimates of practice—a structured interview—is
potentially prone to experimenter bias and response bias <!--[9–11]-->. ...experimenters aware of the
<p align=justify>
[3]
<p align=justify>
hypothesis...can unconsciously influence participants’ estimates in an interview procedure. ... Experimenters in Ericsson <i>et al.</i> also provided participants with a ‘[d]escription of the institute and the purpose of the study’ just before the interview began <!--[12, p. 151]-->. Depending on what was said, this could have influenced participants’ estimates. To reduce potential experimenter-expectancy bias and response bias, the present study employed a double-blind procedure—...
<h4>
1.2.3. Multiple definitions
</h4>
<p align=justify>
Ericsson et al. <!--[1]--> appear to theoretically define deliberate practice as practice activities designed by a teacher. ... However, according to both the study’s Methods section and the interview protocol...<i>[they also]</i> appear to operationally define deliberate practice as ‘practice alone’ with no indication that participants were asked to restrict their estimates of practice to only those designed by a teacher. ...
<p align=justify>
[4]
<p align=justify>
In the present study, we first asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as <i>practice</i> alone with no restrictions that the activities be teacher designed,... We next asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as <i>teacher-designed practice,</i> restricting estimates to time spent on practice activities that had been designed by a teacher.
</blockquote>
<p>
If someone asked me this, I don't know that I could answer second part. My teachers didn't
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
design
</mark>
my practice; I did. So my answer is: none. Although I was certainly applying my teachers' observations and remarks at all times. So, on second thought, my answer is: all.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
[5]
<h4>
2.1.4. Sample Size
</h4>
<p align=justify>
... Conducting expertise research, by definition, means studying a small subset of the population, thus there are relatively few participants from which to sample, making large-sample replications nearly impossible. However, if replications of expertise studies never enter the scientific record because of small samples, then we probably will never provide additional evidence to support or refute the original studies. ...
<p align=justify>
... when the original study (with a small sample) has already entered the scientific record, replications with similar sample sizes (since that is all that is feasible) should also be allowed to enter the scientific record...
<p align=justify>
Further, the original publication made clear and bold claims,... ...while a similar finding from a small replication study would add minimal support, evidence contradicting an ‘impossibility’ needs only a single example to falsify it. In this way, replications of any size have the potential to contribute to our understanding...
<p align=justify>
[6]
<h4>
2.2 Materials and Procedure
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[7]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
...enjoyableness of the activity without considering the outcome of the activity. We provided the same example as Ericsson <i>et al.</i> to describe this: ‘… it is possible to enjoy the result of having cleaned one’s house without enjoying the activity of cleaning.’
</blockquote>
...
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[15]
<p align=justify>
<h4>4. Discussion</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[16]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
We did not replicate Ericsson <i>et al.’s</i> major result of ‘complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin.’ While the less accomplished violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the more accomplished groups, we found no statistically significant differences in accumulated practice alone to age 18 between the best and good violinists. In fact, the <i>majority</i> of the best violinists had accumulated <i>less</i> practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists. The results were similar when restricting practice estimates to only activities that were designed by a teacher.
<p align=justify>
Further, the size of the effect did not replicate. ... explaining 26% of performance variance is not an inconsequential amount. However, this amount does not support the claim that performance levels can ‘<i>largely</i> be accounted for by differential amounts of past
and current levels of practice’...
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
One possibility for the different findings could be differing levels of expertise. While...our violinists appeared to have the same relative difference in skill from each other, they may have an overall higher level of expertise than Ericsson <i>et al.</i>’s violinists (e.g. the current violinists had entered many more competitions than those in 1993). If this is the case, it
could be that the importance of deliberate practice diminishes at high levels of expertise in music, as has been demonstrated in sports.
</blockquote>
<p>
i.e. Practice smarter, not harder?
<p>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Expertise
</mark>
above clearly means something different than it does in the subtitle to <i>Peak</i>. They seem to mean something like "savvy." As a brass player, I might say "guile."
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[17]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
4.1. Multiple definitions of deliberate practice
</h4>
<p align=justify>
To the best of our knowledge, the present study was the first to test and compare both definitions of deliberate practice—practice alone and teacher-designed practice. ...
<p align=justify>
...Ericsson has sometimes argued that practice activities need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In the context of arguing against the results of a meta-analysis that found deliberate practice was less important that Ericsson <i>et al.</i> claimed, Ericsson...argued that many of the included studies should have been excluded because they do not meet the criteria for deliberate practice. Specifically, he stated, ‘The absence of a teacher for all or most of the accumulated practice time violates the definition [of deliberate practice].’ He rejected a number of studies included
in the meta-analysis, including several of his own studies, because the ‘[a]rticles do not record a teacher or coach supervising and guiding all or most of the practice.’
<p align=justify>
In contrast with the definition of deliberate practice where activities need to be designed by a teacher, Ericsson <!--[13,15,16]--> has sometimes argued that practice activities do not need be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In line with this definition, Ericsson <i>et al.</i> asked participants to estimate hours of ‘practice alone’ with no apparent restriction to teacher-designed practice. ...
<p align=justify>
If deliberate practice is assumed to be the most important activity for improving performance, then our results do not support the notion that practice activities <i>need to</i> be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...
<p align=justify>
[18]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
...our findings suggest one of two definitions of deliberate practice should be adopted. The first possibility is that deliberate practice (at least in classical music) should clearly and consistently be defined as ‘practice alone’. ...
<p align=justify>
The other possibility is that deliberate practice should follow Ericsson’s <!--[14,17,18]--> definition that practice activities do <i>not</i> need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...
<p align=justify>
We believe that theoretical definitions should be empirically tested and not changed depending on the argument. As an example of such a change based on argument, take Tuffiash <i>et al.</i>’s study of expert Scrabble players. Tuffiash <i>et al.</i> described the experts’ practice as ‘activities that best met the theoretical description of deliberate practice’ <!--(p. 131)-->. And, citing that study, Ericsson <i>et al.</i> <!--[23]--> later described those same activities as ‘meeting the criteria of deliberate practice’. However, when arguing against the meta-analytic results, Ericsson rejected this same study because the activities ‘violate our original definition of deliberate practice’. Definitions of key theoretical terms must be consistent in order to accumulate evidence for or against a theory.
</blockquote>
<p>
Hmm.
<p>
The Tuffiash paper is paywalled, but the abstact suggests that findings were strongly in favor of nurture as against nature. This comports with my firsthand experience in Scrabble. It does not comport with my firsthand experience in music. Which is to say: I don't think that we should expect to find, eventually, some theory of "expertise" which is ultimately generalizable across disciplines.
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
DAVID Z. HAMBRICK, FERNANDA FERREIRA, AND JOHN M. HENDERSON
<br>
<a href="
https://slate.com/technology/2014/09/malcolm-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-for-deliberate-practice-is-wrong-genes-for-music-iq-drawing-ability-and-other-skills.html
">
Practice Does Not Make Perfect
</a>
<br>
SEPT 28, 2014 7:45 PM
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed <i>22 times</i> more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.
<p align=justify>
... We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. ... With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. ... But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill <i>unexplained</i> than it explained. ...
<p align=justify>
What are these other factors? ... One may be the age at which a person starts an activity. ...Gobet and Campitelli found that chess players who started playing early reached higher levels of skill as adults than players who started later, even after taking into account the fact that the early starters had accumulated more deliberate practice than the later starters. ...
<p align=justify>
Wouldn’t it be better to just act <i>as if</i> we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. ...
<p align=justify>
The second reason we should not pretend we are endowed with the same abilities is that doing so perpetuates the myth that is at the root of much inaction in society—the myth that people can help themselves to the same degree if they just try hard enough. ...
</blockquote>
<p>
This is trite intellectual territory, but the reminder is always welcome: neither of the facile poles of the "merit" discourse are coherent in and of themselves.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Our abilities might not be identical, and our needs surely differ, but our basic human rights are universal.
</blockquote>
<p>
But I'm not sure this is coherent either. "Basic human rights" ought to reflect "needs" and not wants. But "if our needs surely differ," then this purported "universal"-ity is in some kind of trouble.
<p>
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/01/goodman-and-goodmansurpluses.html">Goodman and Goodman</a>: <i>"If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political intervention than to raise the standard of living."</i>
<br><br>
</p>
<p>
And earlier, the authors warn against the type of argument which
<blockquote>
conflates scientific evidence with how that evidence might be used—which is to say that information about genetic diversity can just as easily be used for good as for ill.
</blockquote>
<p>
Yep, and that's why Philosophy, like Jazz and The Author, won't die even after it has been killed. Science without Philosophy is just educated nihilism.
</p>
<br><br><hr>
<p>
Fernand Gobet and Morgan H. Ereku
<br>
<a href="
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265214256
">Checkmate to Deliberate Practice: The Case of Magnus Carlsen</a>
<br>
(2014)
</p>
<blockquote>
[1]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
As top performers have spent similar number of hours to improve and maintain their skills, the fact that individuals...have so outrageously dominated their sport throws considerable doubt on the deliberate practice framework.
</blockquote>
<p>
Previously I thought I might be losing my mind since no
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
academic</mark>s
ever seem to mention this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
more naturalistic data
</mark>
, which could more concisely be called "paying attention."
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald
<br>
<a href="
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Macnamara-et-al.-2014.pdf
">Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis</a>
<br>
(2014)
</p>
<blockquote>
[2]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
... We made no prediction about how the strength of the relationship between deliberate practice and performance would vary across domains. However, we did predict that this relationship would generally be more positive for high-predictability activities than for low-predictability activities, on the basis of findings that effects of training on performance are stronger when the task environment is more predictable.
<p align=justify>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[5]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
<b><i>Theoretical moderators.</i></b> Domain was a statistically significant moderator... Percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports..., 4% for education..., and less than 1% for professions...
<p align=justify>
Predictability of the task environment was also a statistically significant moderator,... As hypothesized, the percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was largest (24%) for activities high in predictability..., intermediate (12%) for activities moderate in predictability..., and smallest (4%) for activities low in predictability...
<p align=justify>
<b><i>Methodological moderators.</i></b> The method used to assess deliberate practice was a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 20% for studies that used a retrospective interview..., 12% for studies that used a retrospective questionnaire..., and 5% for studies that used a log method...
<p align=justify>
The method used to assess performance was also a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for studies that used group membership..., 14% for studies that
used laboratory tasks, 9% for studies that used expert ratings..., and 8% for
studies that used standardized objective scoring measures...
</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8EeRwTBUjNNAp-nnwX-Jy5kRcV3KfJbDQ5tT08HNZmw9ukA0GTbqLTXLvWwI-gf5pySaytTlo9bGMXeceRrht8C3UuabOftHMIqkgVTUbxhoZGo1lVDNWnMJHbzrTDfdXJM7X6drN5__dUTbcN-43nC-nqg3viQkPmIohc5TZ7o_K029KLa6EOg/s1184/Screenshot%202024-01-02%2011.24.38.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="447" data-original-width="1184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8EeRwTBUjNNAp-nnwX-Jy5kRcV3KfJbDQ5tT08HNZmw9ukA0GTbqLTXLvWwI-gf5pySaytTlo9bGMXeceRrht8C3UuabOftHMIqkgVTUbxhoZGo1lVDNWnMJHbzrTDfdXJM7X6drN5__dUTbcN-43nC-nqg3viQkPmIohc5TZ7o_K029KLa6EOg/s320/Screenshot%202024-01-02%2011.24.38.png"/></a></div>
<blockquote>
<p>
[8]
<p align=justify>
The second <i>["additional"]</i> model included only the 59 effect sizes for
solitary deliberate practice (games: 6; music: 9; sports: 14; education: 30; professions: 0). We tested this model to address the question of whether deliberate practice must be performed in isolation to be maximally effective. The overall percentage of variance explained by deliberate practice was 11% in this model (games: 23%; music: 23%; sports: 22%; and education: 3%;..., which indicates that solitary deliberate practice is not a stronger predictor of performance than deliberate practice with other people.
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
General Discussion
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
... Why were the effect sizes for education and professions so much smaller? One possibility is that deliberate practice is less well defined in these domains. It could also be that in some of the studies, participants differed in amount of prestudy expertise (e.g., amount of domain knowledge before taking an academic course or accepting a job) and thus in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to achieve a given level of performance.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[9]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
... Ericsson et al. (1993) argued that any performance advantage associated with starting age simply reflects the fact that a person who starts at a
young age has more time to accumulate deliberate practice than a person who starts at a later age. However, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) and Howard (2012) found that starting age negatively predicted chess rating even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice. This evidence suggests that there may be an optimal developmental period for acquiring complex skills, as there seems to be for acquiring language.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<!--
Brooke N. Macnamara, Adam B. Moore, Judy A. Kegl and Andrew R. A. Conway
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233652301">Domain-general cognitive abilities and simultaneous interpreting skill</a>
<br>
(2011)
<p>
[no notes]
</p>
<hr>
-->
<br>
<p>
Brooke N. Macnamara and David J. Frank
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324172849">How do Task Characteristics Affect Learning and Performance? The Roles of Variably Mapped and Dynamic Tasks</a>
<br>
(2018)
</p>
<br><br>
<font face=times>
<blockquote>
[1]
<p align=justify>
...psychologist who label themselves “expertise researchers,” tend focus on differences in the amount of accumulated practice to explain variation in performance... By contrast, those who label themselves “individual differences researchers,” “intelligence researchers,” or “working memory researchers” tend to focus on individual differences in cognitive resources as explanations for individual variation... Yet both
practice-performance relationships...and abilities-performance relationships...for real-world tasks tend to be relatively small. That is, both the expertise and individual differences literatures leave the majority of interindividual variance in real-world performance unexplained.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Even more importantly, there is considerable heterogeneity in the predictive power of both practice and cognitive ability across studies... We propose that the general lack of predictive power in both expertise and individual differences research, as well as the gross heterogeneity of findings, stem in part from a common problem: the failure to account for moderating task characteristics.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...
<br><br>
<h3>
<center>
Task Characteristics
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...
<p align=justify>
[2]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
... In a meta-analysis, Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (2014) found <i>performance domain</i> to be a significant moderator of the relationship between practice and performance:... Similarly, meta-analyses examining the relationship between general mental ability and job performance...
<!--
(e.g., Hunter & Hunter, 1984; Salgado et al., 2003)
-->
find that the relationship between general fluid intelligence and job performance differs based on job domain. Despite this, few studies have sought to determine the underlying features that dictate the extent to which a task relies on basic cognitive resources in addition to task-specific practice.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Although task characteristics have largely been ignored in experimental studies of individual differences in task performance, there is one notable exception. Ackerman’s (1986) performance-ability relations theory suggests that task characteristics can be thought of in terms of having consistent (consistently mapped) components or inconsistent (variably mapped) components—which determine how practice and cognitive resources influence performance. Ackerman (1986) proposed that tasks with consistent components allow automatic processes to develop with practice...
<!--
(see also Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977).
-->
Once automatic processes are in place, individual differences in available cognitive resources are less associated with differences in task performance. In contrast, tasks with inconsistent (variably mapped) components continuously require controlled processing to perform the task despite training, thus recruiting cognitive resources even after accumulating task-specific practice.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...
<br><br>
<h3>
<center>
Dimensions of Difficulty
</center></h3>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Until recently, a set of additional task characteristics thought to
impact learning and performance had not been formally proposed.
In a recent book titled <i>Accelerated Expertise: Training for High
Proficiency in a Complex World</i>, Hoffman et al. (2014) put forth
eight <i>dimensions of difficulty</i> hypothesized to increase task difficulty across domains via their reliance on limited cognitive resources.
<ol type="1">
<li>
<!--1.-->
Static versus dynamic: Important aspects of static tasks can be captured in “snapshots,” whereas dynamic tasks are continuously changing. ...
</li>
<p>
<!--
For example, chess is a static
-->
<p>
[3]
<p>
...
<!--
task where players can take their time to make decisions. By contrast Pacman (Namco, 1980) is a dynamic task where the information is constantly changing.
-->
<li>
<!--2.-->
Discrete versus continuous: Attributes of discrete tasks are characterized by a small number of categories, whereas attributes of continuous tasks are characterized by a continua of features or a large number of categorical distinctions. ...
<!--
For example, chess is a discrete task, with discrete categories for each piece and discrete positions on the board. By contrast, distance and angles in the game pool fall on a continuum.
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--3.-->
Separable versus interactive: Processes in separable tasks occur independently or with weak interactions, whereas processes in interactive tasks are strongly interdependent. ...
<!--
For example, games like Whac-A-Mole and Duck Hunt (Nintendo, 1984) are largely separable; whenever a stimulus appears, the player responds to it independently of the other stimuli—there is little to no need to coordinate her actions between stimuli. By contrast, air traffic control is a highly interactive task; each process, directing an aircraft to take off, land, or change altitude must be coordinated with the flight paths of all other aircraft.
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--4.-->
Sequential versus simultaneous: Processes in sequential tasks occur one at a time, whereas processes in simultaneous tasks occur at the same time. ...
<!--
For example, baseball is a sequential task; fielding and batting occur sequentially and a player is never engaged at both at once. By contrast, flying an aircraft involves a great deal of simultaneity; one must monitor gauges, speed, and heading,
simultaneously.
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--5.-->
Linear versus nonlinear: Relationships among features in linear tasks are proportional and can be conveyed with a single line of explanation, whereas relationships among features in nonlinear tasks are nonproportional and require multiple lines of explanation. ...
<!--
For example, in baseball, the faster a pitcher moves his arm, the faster the pitch. By contrast, in basketball the relationship between
the angle that a ball should be thrown and distance from the net is nonlinear.
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--6.-->
Single versus multiple representations: Elements in single-representation tasks have one or very few interpretations or uses, whereas elements in multiple-representation tasks have multiple interpretations, and uses, based on context. ...
<!--
For example, in chess, each piece affords a single representation; it can only behave in one manner. By contrast, in sports video games, the same button may have different functions depending on the context (offense or defense).
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--7.-->
Mechanistic versus organic: Attributes in mechanistic tasks can be understood in terms of their parts. Effects in mechanistic tasks have direct causal agents, whereas organic tasks must be understood as a whole and effects in these tasks are due to system-wide functions. ...
<!--
For example, the game Pong (Atari, 1972) is highly mechanistic; the behavior of the ball and paddle are the result of direct causal agents and can easily be understood in isolation. By contrast, chess is
highly organic; only by understanding the relationship between all of the pieces on the board can one make optimal decisions.
-->
</li>
<br>
<li>
<!--8.-->
Homogenous versus heterogeneous: Components and conceptual representations in homogenous tasks are uniform across a system (e.g., there is a single explanation), whereas components and conceptual representations in heterogeneous tasks are diverse. ...
<!--
For example, first-person shooter videogames are largely homogenous; if a player’s health decreases it is always because he has taken damage from an enemy. By contrast, automotive diagnostics are heterogeneous; there may be multiple possible explanations for a single problem. For example, a car overheating could be due to insufficient coolant levels, poor airflow, or a malfunctioning fan.
-->
</li>
</p>
</ol>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
The dimensions of task difficulty are intuitively appealing.
However, they have not yet been empirically tested.
</p>
<br><br>
<h3>
<center>
The Present Studies
</center></h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[4]
<p align=justify>
...
<h3>
<center>
Experiment 1
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[10]
<p align=justify>
...
<h3>
<center>
Experiment 2
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[11]
<p align=justify>
...
<h3>
<center>
General Discussion
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[12]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
Our results suggest that task characteristics are an important component of any model or theory of skill acquisition or expertise. Specifically, task characteristics affected the impact of cognitive load and practice amounts on learning and performance. This finding suggests that the predictive power of cognitive resources on expertise and the predictive power of practice on expertise are not set amounts that can be applied to any task or any performance domain. Rather, the influence of these factors is systematically heightened or reduced depending on the characteristics of the task.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[13]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
... Currently, industrial/organizational psychologists are aware that general cognitive resources best predict occupational level and performance (even better than job experience), as well as rate of learning when receiving job
<p align=justify>
[14]
<p align=justify>
training <!--(Schmidt & Hunter, 2004)-->. Additionally, the predictive
power of general cognitive ability increases as complexity—information processing requirements— of the job increases <!--(Hunter &
Hunter, 1984)-->. However, better understanding of how task characteristics impact information processing requirements can refine
job classifications and enhance systems for personnel recruitment,
work placement, and training.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
I look forward to seeing <i>that</i> angle applied back to music, where much of this chatter got started, because I've known some great musicians whose, uh,...
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
general cognitive ability
</mark>
was not terribly impressive in any other domain, and I've seen some very smart students struggle mightily with elementary "general music." (Oliver Sacks has of course documented some extreme examples arising from congenital conditions or later injury.)
<p>
Certainly there is a just aversion to bringing things like
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
job classifications
</mark>
into the artistic/creative side of this discussion. But honestly, the more I've been privileged to actually "work at playing," i.e. the more I've had to put up with mis-<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
placement</mark> and subpar
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
occupational
</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
performance
</mark>
, the more willing I have gotten to broach things in those terms. Of course when I was underemployed it was easier to parrot the notion that there are too many musicians and not enough work. Now I'm working and, hate to say it, but there seems to be about as much work as there are really good musicians to do it.
<p>
Also, don't forget that musicians can join or leave the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expert
</mark>
cohort at <i>any</i> point in life, not just at the beginning and end!
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick, & Brooke N. Macnamara
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339026256">How Firm Are the Foundations of Mindset Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger than the Evidence</a>
<br>
(2020)
<p>
(From a word doc, hence pagination probably differs from published version.)
</p>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[3]
<!--
<p align=justify>
<center>
How Firm Are the Foundations of Mindset Theory?
The Claims Appear Stronger than the Evidence
</center>
-->
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
There is currently a great deal of scientific interest in <i>mindset</i> (i.e., <i>implicit theories</i>). Mindset refers to people’s beliefs about the nature of personal attributes, such as intelligence. People who hold <i>growth mindsets</i> (i.e., incremental theorists) believe attributes are malleable, whereas those who hold <i>fixed mindsets</i> (i.e., entity theorists) believe attributes are unchangeable (Dweck, 2006). According to Dweck (2006), “the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life” (p. 6). The rationale is that mindsets form the “core” of people’s meaning systems, bringing together goals, beliefs, and behaviors to shape people’s thoughts and actions (Dweck & Yeager, 2019).
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Honestly, the only place I've ever seen the phrase "growth mindset" is on dating sites, where I have seen it on most (seemingly all) profiles of people in banking, finance, real estate, accounting, etc., and on very few others. Like many such sayings which people fall back on, the misprision eventually becomes part of the new meaning. Hence to me, now, it seems to refer simultaneously to personal, financial, reputational and familial "growth." But here is its actual source, apparently.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
The presumed importance of mindset rests on several theoretical premises. ...
<p><b>
Premise 1: People with Growth Mindsets Hold Learning Goals
</b></p>
<!--
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Rattan et al. (2015) stated, “students with growth mindsets seek to learn and develop their abilities” (p. 722), Indeed,
-->
<p align=justify>
...according to Dweck and Yeager (2019), mindset theory was
developed to explain why some people care more about <i>improving</i> their ability (i.e., learning goals) whereas others care more about <i>proving</i> their ability (i.e., performance goals). ...
<!--
As Dweck
-->
<p align=justify>
[4]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
(2009) explained, people with growth mindsets “care first and foremost about learning” and “the cardinal rule is: Learn, learn, learn!” (p. 4). Thus, mindset should predict learning goal orientation, such that people with more of a growth mindset endorse learning goals more than
people with less of a growth mindset.
-->
<p><b>
Premise 2: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance Goals
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Dweck (2000) stated,
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over….I’ve seen so many people with this <i>one consuming goal</i> of proving themselves—...
<!--
in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. <i>Every</i> situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character
-->
(p. 6, emphasis added).
<p align=justify>
<!--
Additionally, Dweck (2009) explained,
-->
...people with fixed mindsets “have to look good at all times” and “the cardinal rule is: Look talented at all costs” (p. 4). ...
<!--
Thus, mindset should predict performance goal orientation, such that people with more of a fixed mindset endorse performance goals more than people with less of a fixed mindset.
-->
<p><b>
Premise 3: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance-Avoidance Goals
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Burnette, O'Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, and Finkel (2013) stated, “although entity theorists prioritize performance goals more than incremental theorists do, we suggest that this difference is especially strong for performance-avoidance goals.” (p. 660). Dweck (2002) has also described how people with fixed mindsets supposedly avoid performing tasks if they might fail:...
<!--
“Even some of the most talented college students with the fixed view, when we ask them, have told us plainly: ‘If I knew I wasn’t going to do well at a task, I probably wouldn’t do it even if I might learn a lot from it’” (p. 30). Thus, mindset should predict performance-avoidance goal
-->
<p align=justify>
[5]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
orientation, such that people with more of a fixed mindset endorse performance-avoidance goals more than people with less of a fixed mindset.
-->
<p><b>
Premise 4: People with Fixed Mindsets Believe That Talent Alone–Without Effort–Creates Success
</b></p>
<!--
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Dweck (2009) claimed,
-->
<p align=justify>
...“Those with a fixed mindset believe that if you have natural talent, you shouldn’t need much effort”...
<!--
(p. 2). Also, as stated on Dweck’s website,
-->
...people with fixed mindsets “believe that talent alone creates success–without effort”...
<!--
(https://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/about/). Thus, mindset should predict agreement with the statement “Talent alone–without effort–creates success,” such that people with more of a fixed mindset agree with this statement more than people with less of a fixed mindset.
-->
<p><b>
Premise 5: People with Growth Mindsets Persist to Overcome Challenge
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Rattan et al. (2015) explained, “students with growth mindsets…pursue challenges…and are resilient to setbacks; in contrast, students with fixed mindsets avoid challenges…and give up more easily when facing setbacks” (p. 722). Indeed, mindset has been described as “a theory of
challenge-seeking and resilience” (Dweck & Yeager, 2019, p. 482). ...
<!--
According to Dweck (2006), “perseverance and resilience [are] produced by a growth mindset” (p. 12). Likewise,
-->
...the for-profit mindset-intervention company Mindset Works (co-founded by Dweck) explains on their website: “Children with a growth mindset persist in the face of challenges”...
<!--
(https://www.mindsetworks.com/parents/). Thus, mindset should predict endorsement of statements about persisting to overcome a challenge, such that people with more of a growth mindset endorse these statements more than people with less of a growth mindset.
-->
<p align=justify>
[6]
<p><b>
Premise 6: People with Growth Mindsets Are More Resilient Following Failure
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
According to Yeager and Dweck (2012), mindsets “appear to create different psychological worlds for students: one that promotes resilience and one that does not” (p. 304). ...
<!--
Boaler (2013) further explained, “The implications of this mindset are profound—students with a growth mindset work and learn more effectively, displaying a desire for challenge and resilience in the face of failure” (p. 143).
-->
By contrast, individuals with fixed mindsets are “devastated by setbacks” (Dweck, 2008). ...
<!--
Thus, mindset should predict performance following failure, such that people with more of a growth mindset perform better following failure than people with less of a growth mindset. These results should also hold after controlling for ability.
-->
<p><b>
Prior Evidence for Premises
</b></p>
<!--
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
The available evidence suggests that these claims are overstated. For example,
-->
<p align=justify>
...despite the claim that people with growth mindsets care first and foremost about learning (Premise 1), a recent meta-analysis found the correlation between mindset and learning goal orientation was only !̅= .19 (Burnette et al., 2013). For comparison, other personality constructs correlate much more strongly with learning goal orientation: self-efficacy (!̅= .56); need for achievement (!̅=
.38); openness to experience (!̅= .34) (Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien, 2007). Burnette et al.’s
meta-analysis also revealed weak evidence for Premises 2 and 3:...
<!--
mindset only correlated !̅= -.15 with performance goal orientation and !̅= -.18 with performance-avoidance goal orientation. For comparison, Payne et al.’s meta-analysis (2007) found that self-efficacy correlated !̅= -.47 with performance-avoidance goal orientation. Referring to mindset, Payne et al. (2007) concluded that “the effect sizes were very small, providing little evidence for Dweck’s (1986) view that implicit theories are the primary underlying antecedent of GO [goal orientation]” (p. 140).
-->
<p align=justify>
[7]
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
We could find no evidence that people with fixed mindsets believe that talent without effort creates success (Premise 4).
<!--
Some studies have examined the relationship between mindset and persisting to overcome a challenge (Premise 5). For example, Robins and Pals (2002) found that mindset correlated .48 with a response to challenge scale in college students, and Brown (2009) found that mindset correlated .22 with persistence on a challenging task in children. However, while the implication is that persistence on an experimental task translates into realworld behavior,
-->
...most studies do not test mindset’s relationship with persistence towards a real-world challenging goal that is important to the individual.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Few studies have examined the relationship between one’s naturally-held mindset and resilience to failure (Premise 6). Rather, studies that examined resilience to failure by “helpless” and “mastery-oriented” children..
<!--
(with no measures of mindset; e.g., Diener & Dweck, 1978)
-->
..or after manipulating praise (Mueller & Dweck, 1998) have been interpreted as evidence of mindset’s relationship with resilience...
<!--
(see e.g., Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Good, Rattan, & Dweck, 2012).
-->
However, Li & Bates (2019) directly tested this relationship. In one sample, they found no association between mindset and performance following failure. In another sample, they found that students with <i>fixed mindsets</i> performed better than students with growth mindsets following failure.
<p><b>
Present Study
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
...
<p align=justify>
[8]
<p align=justify>
...
<p><b>
<center>
Method
</center>
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[12]
<p align=justify>
...
<p><b>
<center>
Results
</center>
</b></p>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[20]
<p align=justify>
<center><b>
Discussion
</b></center>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 5%">
Although we did not find robust support for mindset theory’s premises in terms of <i>statistical significance</i>, some might argue that small associations have <i>practical significance</i>. However, without robust evidence that associations are nonzero, as is the case with half the premises tested, there is no evidence of practical significance. ...
<!--
Furthermore, other personality constructs may have greater practical significance than mindset. For instance, one reason mindset is presumed to be important is because of its relationship with learning goal orientation.
-->
We found that mindset accounted for 1% of learning goal orientation variance. By comparison, a meta-analysis found that self-esteem, need for achievement, and general self-efficacy explained 10%, 14%, and 31% of learning goal orientation variance, respectively (Payne et al., 2007).
<p align=justify>
[21]
<p align=justify>
...
</p>
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr>
<p>
Michael J. King & Brooke N. Macnamara
<br>
<a href="
">
Three visual working memory representations simultaneously control attention
</a>
<br>
(2020)
</p>
<br><br>
[no notes]
-->
<hr>
<p>
David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. Oswald
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343716748_Is_the_Deliberate_Practice_View_Defensible_A_Review_of_Evidence_and_Discussion_of_Issues">Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues</a>
<br>
(2020)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[2]
<p align=justify>
...here we will discuss what we believe are serious concerns with whether the deliberate practice view is viable as a <i>scientific theory</i>—that is, whether it is empirically testable and falsifiable. ... Before doing so, however, we note two uncontroversial claims about expertise, by which we simply mean a person’s measurable (i.e., quantifiable) level of performance in a domain. First, as Ericsson and colleagues have emphasized...
<!--
(e.g., Ericsson, 2006)
-->
, <i>expertise is acquired gradually</i>. In other words, people are not <i>literally</i> born as experts,...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
The second uncontroversial claim is that training can lead to large, even massive, improvements in people’s level of expertise (i.e., domain-relevant performance). ...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
...
<h4>
WHAT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[4]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
Challenges to the Deliberate Practice View
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<h4>
New Types of Practice
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[7]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
...Ericsson and colleagues went from arguing that activities exist that meet the criteria for deliberate practice in the boardgame SCRABBLE, to arguing that it is not possible to engage in deliberate practice in SCRABBLE.
Specifically, referring to Tuffiash et al.’s (2007) SCRABBLE study,
Ericsson et al. (2009) stated that “[s]everal researchers have
reported a consistent association between the amount and quality
of solitary activities meeting the criteria of deliberate practice and
<p align=justify>
[8]
<p align=justify>
performance in different domains of expertise, such as. . .Scrabble
(Tuffiash et al., 2007)” (p. 9). However, Moxley et al. (2019) wrote
that because SCRABBLE lacks professional coaches “SCRABBLE players cannot engage in deliberate practice, but only purposeful practice and other types of practice” (p. 1150). Under this new framework, activities that once qualified as deliberate practice are now classified as less effective purposeful practice. Of course, it is
appropriate for a theorist to reinterpret past evidence as a theory is refined and revised over time. But it is a serious problem, as in this case, when the reinterpretations of evidence are not <i>explicitly</i> acknowledged, explained, and justified. ...
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
An awful lot of this seems to hinge on the presence or absence of a coach/teacher. Too much, I would say.
<p>
(In any case, there <i>are</i> some Scrabble (i.e. SCRABBLE) coaches out there, mostly outside of the U.S.)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
[10]
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<h4>
HOW IMPORTANT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE?
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[11]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
IS THE DELIBERATE PRACTICE VIEW DEFENSIBLE?
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[12]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
TOWARD A MULTIFACTORIAL MODEL OF EXPERTISE
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
Developmental Factors
</h4>
<p align=justify>
<!--
The question of when specialized training should commence
in a person’s life is the subject of a longstanding debate in the field of expertise.
-->
... The <i>early specialization</i> view argues that the earlier the training can begin, the better.
<!--
The logic of this view is straightforward:
-->
... Because it is both physically and psychologically taxing, a person can engage in only a few hours of deliberate practice a day...
<!--
(around 4 h on average; Ericsson et al., 1993)
-->
without burnout and/or injury. Therefore, the individual who begins training at a relatively late age (e.g., age 12) can never catch up to the individual who begins training earlier (e.g., age 6). However, in a meta-analysis of sports studies with samples representing a wide range of skill, we found no evidence for an earlier average starting age for high-skill athletes relative to lower-skill athletes. Furthermore, research suggests that the highest (elite) levels of sports performance are associated with a later starting age, combined with participation in a diverse range of sports in adolescence. ...
<h4>
Experiential Factors
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[13]
<p align=justify>
..in Güllich’s (2017) study...
<!--
comparing the 83 international medalists and 83 non-medalists,
-->
he not only found that the medalists had accumulated significantly less
main-sport practice than their less-accomplished counterparts during childhood/adolescence, but also that the medalists had accumulated significantly more experience with other sports during this period...
<!--
(see also Güllich et al., 2017).
-->
<h4>
Ability Factors
</h4>
<p align=justify>
Research has firmly established that cognitive ability explains a
statistically and practically significant amount of the variability
in people’s acquisition of complex skills...
<!--
(Hambrick et al., 2019; also see Ackerman, 1987, for a review of early studies).
-->
That is, people higher in cognitive ability learn complex skills more
readily and rapidly than people lower in cognitive ability. ...
<!--
For example, in a study of music training, participants with little or
no experience playing music completed tests of cognitive ability,
music aptitude, and growth mindset, and then they were given
instruction in playing a simple piece of music on the piano
(Burgoyne et al., 2019). Higher-ability participants showed a
greater rate of learning than lower-ability participants, with a
general intelligence factor explaining approximately 30% of the
individual differences in learning rate.
-->
Ericsson (2014d) has theorized that general cognitive ability is
important initially in acquiring complex skills, but its predictive
power diminishes as domain-specific skills and knowledge are acquired, stating:
<p align=justify style="margin-left: 5%">
For individuals who have acquired cognitive structures that support a high level of performance the expert performance framework predicts that these acquired cognitive structures will directly mediate superior performance and thus diminishing correlations between general cognitive ability and domain-specific performance (p. 84).
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
For complex tasks of interest to expertise researchers, evidence
for this claim, which we termed
the <i>circumvention-of-limits hypothesis</i> (Hambrick and Meinz, 2011), is weak and inconsistent. In a recent review (Hambrick et al., 2019), we searched through approximately 1,300 articles and identified 15 studies...
<!--
in the domains of games, music, sports, science, medicine/surgery, and aviation
-->
relevant to this hypothesis. Of the 15 studies, only three yielded any evidence supportive of the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis. Moreover, methodological limitations...
<!--
(e.g., small <i>N</i>s, measures with unknown or unreported reliability)
-->
precluded any strong conclusions from those few studies. Providing what might be considered the strongest evidence for the hypothesis, one of these three studies that seem to support the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis was a meta-analysis of chess studies...
<!--
(Burgoyne et al., 2016; see also Burgoyne et al., 2018, corrigendum).
-->
As determined by a moderator test, fluid intelligence correlated
significantly more strongly with chess rating in lower-skill chess
players (avg. r = 0.32) than in higher-skill chess players (avg.
r = 0.14). However, it is important to note that skill level was highly confounded with age (i.e., lower-ability samples were youth, whereas higher-ability samples were adults), limiting the strength of the evidence in support of the circumvention-oflimits hypothesis.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
We also note that results that have sometimes been used to argue that the influence of general cognitive ability on expertise diminishes with increasing skill do not warrant this conclusion. ...
<!--
For example, Ericsson (2014d) pointed to results by Ruthsatz et al. (2008) as support for this hypothesis.
-->
Ruthsatz et al. (2008) found that a measure of general cognitive ability...
<!--
(Raven’s Progressive Matrices score)
-->
correlated positively and significantly with musical accomplishment in high school band members (r = 0.25, p < 0.05), but not in university music majors (r = 0.24) or conservatory students (r = 0.12).
</blockquote>
<p>
Cute.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
However, the critical question is not whether the lower-skill group correlation is statistically significant while the higher-skill group correlations are not. Rather, it is whether the former correlation and the latter correlations are significantly <i>different from each other</i>, as determined by the appropriate statistical test. As it happens, in the Ruthsatz et al. (2008) study, the correlations are not significantly different from each other (all <i>z</i> tests for differences in correlations are statistically non-significant). Thus, the results of Ruthsatz et al.’s (2008) study <i>fail</i> to support the hypothesis that ability-performance correlations diminish with increasing skill.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
We also reviewed evidence relevant to the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis from the job performance literature, and here the evidence is more consistent and interpretable. General cognitive ability is regarded as the single best predictor of job training performance, and of subsequent job performance...
<!--
(Schmidt and Hunter, 2004; Schmidt, 2014).
-->
...
<h4>
Genetic and Environmental Influences
</h4>
<p align=justify>
Research in the field of behavioral genetics has demonstrated that both genetic and environmental variance across individuals
<p align=justify>
[14]
<p align=justify>
contribute to the total variance in a wide range of behavioral
outcomes (Turkheimer, 2000), including ability factors that have been found to correlate with measures of expertise. ...
<!--
The extent of the genetic contribution is captured by the heritability statistic (<i>h</i><sup>2</sup>), an estimate of the proportion (0 to 1) of the total variance in a trait that can be attributed to genetic (nonenvironmental) variance within a sample of individuals (Plomin
et al., 2008).
-->
Because some of these factors correlate with expertise, it stands to reason that both genetic and environmental variance may also contribute to the total variance in expertise. Furthermore, basic abilities and characteristics that may predict individual differences in expertise have also been observed to be substantially heritable, including drawing ability (Arden et al., 2014), music aptitude (Ullén et al., 2014; see Mosing et al., 2018, for a review), and maximal oxygen consumption in athletic performance...
<!--
(VO<sub>2 <i>max</i></sub>; Schutte et al., 2016).
-->
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
At the same time, no psychological trait is 100% heritable
(Turkheimer, 2000), and even the most heritable psychological trait will have a sizeable environmental component. For example, heritability estimates for measures of general cognitive ability are typically in the 50 to 70% range in samples drawn from developed countries (e.g., Tucker-Drob and Bates, 2016), with the remaining variance (as much as 50%) explained by shared and/or non-shared environmental factors. This means that correlations between a measure of some trait (e.g., general cognitive ability) and a measure of expertise could be driven by the genetic variance or the environmental variance in the trait measure, or by both types of variances. In other words, the finding that a measure of a heritable trait correlates with expertise is only <i>consistent with the possibility</i> that genetic variance is a component of individual differences in expertise.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
It is also critical to note that genes and environments cannot
generally be assumed to be uncorrelated across people. Rather,
across people, genetically influenced factors may contribute to
variance in the environments which people seek out and are
exposed to. This is the idea of <i>gene-environment correlation</i>, or
<i>r</i>GE (Plomin et al., 1977). For example, just as children who are
tall might be more interested in playing basketball and more likely to be selected to play on basketball teams than children who are shorter, those with a high level of music aptitude may be more likely to take up, be selected for, and persist in music than those with a lower level of this aptitude. Consistent with this sort of speculation, there is now evidence to indicate that the propensity to practice in a domain is substantially heritable. In a large twin study, Mosing, Ullén, and colleagues found an average heritability of around 50% for accumulated amount of music practice (Mosing et al., 2014; see also Hambrick and TuckerDrob, 2015). A possible explanation for this finding is that music aptitude, as well as more general ability and non-ability factors, differentially predispose people to engaging in music practice.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
...
<p align=justify>
[15]
<p align=justify>
...“A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability” (Chabris et al., 2015, p. 305). Research is uncovering genetic variants that may contribute to individual differences in expertise, but it is highly unrealistic to expect that any one of these factors will account for a large amount of the variance in expertise.
<h4>
Putting It All Together
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
THE PATH AHEAD IN EXPERTISE RESEARCH
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
Recommendations For Expertise Research
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
... It is axiomatic in the psychological methods literature that virtually no observed measure (or indicator) is “construct pure.” That is, a score collected by an instrument (test, questionnaire, etc.) designed
<p align=justify>
[16]
<p align=justify>
to measure a given hypothetical construct may reflect that construct to some degree, but it will certainly reflect other, construct-irrelevant factors, such as participants’ familiarity with a particular method of assessment...
<!--
(e.g., test format)
-->
and psychological states that may affect their responding...
<!--
(e.g., sleep deprivation and motivation).
-->
There is no perfect way to deal with this problem, but when multiple measures of a construct are obtained, it becomes possible to use data-analytic techniques...
<!--
(viz., structural equation modeling)
-->
that are explicitly designed to deal with this issue by allowing researchers to model latent variables that are closer to theoretical constructs of interest than observed variables are.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 3%">
<!--
The third recommendation is that
-->
...the sample of participants from the targeted domain should ideally represent a wide range of performance rather than extreme groups.
<!--
As we have noted elsewhere (Hambrick et al., 2019),
-->
...categories such as “novice” and “expert” are not naturally occurring—they are groups of performers created based on ultimately arbitrary cuts on performance scores. Accordingly, scientific research on expertise should endeavor to explain the full range of performance
differences within different domains rather than differences between artificial groups of performers, and also continuities and discontinuities across this range (see Bliese and Lang, 2016).
</blockquote>
<p>
For once the the woolly-headed pomos reached the destination before the hardnecked empiricists, this via the superficial political appeal of "studying everybody."
<p>
If these scientists really have found that the
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
cuts
</mark>
between
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
categories such as “novice” and “expert”
</mark>
really, truly have been made
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
arbitrar</mark>ily by previous generations of researchers,
then I ought to be willing to take their word for it. I do wonder even so if pointing out that said "categories" are not
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
naturally occurring
</mark>
is not a bit of a strawman. The <i>social</i> demarcation of novice and expert in music, e.g., though it certainly is an "arbitrary" demarcation in a sizable minority of cases, is on the whole rooted in some discernible fundamentals, some of which, I would think, could actually be isolated, classified, and observed "scientifically." If, on the other hand, these types of social factors are found to be really no different than those aspects of SCRABBLE which can be practiced "purposefully" but not "deliberately," then that would resolve the tension and set the stage for consideration of the
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
full range
</mark>
.
<p>
e.g. Some musicians who are, let's say, not very good, nonetheless find some work based on their knowledge of particular repertoire, of various written and unwritten codes of comportment, and a thousand other "skills" which could be acquired by almost anybody regardless of musical or cognitive aptitude. It's totally reasonable for laboratory psychologists to decide that these are not actually experts, not even if pet columnists for the <i>International Musician</i>, Maoists in Hollenbeck park, the IRS, et al, for their own reasons persist in arguing the contrary. But the question then becomes, <i>where</i> out here in the so-called Real World can one lay one's own eyes and ears on the "empirical" reality of skill acquisition? If the musicians playing for your kid's birthday party are mere <i>kleine</i>-experts, where can we find the <i>uber</i>-experts?
<p>
In other words: on one side we have "expertise researchers" looking into how people get good at things, but necessarily compartmentalized from the question of whether <i>other</i> people <i>actually</i> think and behave <i>as if</i> people who have gotten good at things <i>are</i> good at them. And on the other side we have "people" living their lives, having various wants and needs arise therein, and unable to fully optimize the meeting of said wants and needs in part because they will not/cannot quite accept experthood where and how it actually exists: they want medical advice that doesn't conflict with their designer religion; they prefer musical performers and major-league athletes who look, talk and act like them; etc. "Where does expertise come from?" is one question. "...and where does it go?" is another question.
</p>
<!--
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[17]
<h4>
CONCLUSION
</h4>
</p>
</blockquote>
</font>
-->
<br><br>
<!--
<hr>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356095081">Further Muddying the Waters? A Comment on Bell et al’s 2021 Definition of Youth Sport Specialization</a>
<br>
<p align=right>
<i>Arne G:ullich, PhD</i>
<br>
University of Technology Kaiserlautern, Germany
<br>
<i>Brooke N. Macnamara, PhD</i>
<br>
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
<br>
<i>Michael Barth, PhD</i>
<br>
University of Applied Sciences Kufstein, Austria
<br>
<i>David Z. Hambrick, PhD</i>
<br>
Michigan State University, East Lansing
</p>
[no notes]
-->
<hr>
<p>
Michael Barth · Arne Güllich · Brooke N. Macnamara · David Z. Hambrick
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357897021_Predictors_of_Junior_Versus_Senior_Elite_Performance_are_Opposite_A_Systematic_Review_and_Meta-Analysis_of_Participation_Patterns">Predictors of Junior Versus Senior Elite Performance are Opposite: A Systematic Review and Meta‑Analysis of Participation Patterns</a>
<br>
(2022)
</p>
<blockquote>
[1399]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
1 Introduction
</h4>
<p align=justify>
....
<p align=justify>
[1400, boxed]
<b>Key Points</b>
<p>
Short-term junior-age athletic success is facilitated by an early start in the main sport, rapid initial progress, and intensive specialized coach-led practice in the main sport, with little or no practice in other sports.
<br>
Long-term adult-age success is facilitated by extensive childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice, relatively late start in the main sport, gradual initial progress, and only moderate childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice.
<br>
Peer-led play in the main sport or in other sports has negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.
<br><br>
<p>
...
</p>
<p align=justify>
Ericsson et al. <!--[8]--> proposed that performance is monotonically related to the cumulative amount of deliberate practice:... By inference, investing time and efort in other types of sport activities...
<!--
—practice in other sports or play activities in the main sport or in
other sports—
-->
reduces the amount of deliberate practice and thereby performance. Ericsson et al. <!--[8]--> also emphasized the importance of rapid initial performance progress...
<p align=justify>
In contrast, the early diversifcation path of the DMSP <!--[11]--> <i>["Developmental Model of Sport Participation"]</i> holds that, although deliberate practice is necessary, single-sport specialization and intensive deliberate practice should not commence until adolescence. This late specialization should be preceded by extensive childhood/adolescent deliberate play in various sports: “pick-up” games that are regulated by the participants, not by a coach (i.e., peer-led play), and are undertaken for the inherent enjoyment of the
game rather than to improve performance...
<p align=justify>
Early specialization and early diversifcation have typically been regarded as two contrasting, dichotomous participation patterns <!--[1, 3, 4, 11, 18, 19]-->, but this is an imprecise characterization. An athlete’s participation pattern is generally characterized by several continuous, quantitative variables, including starting age and amounts of coach-led practice and peer-led play, both in the athlete’s main sport
and in other sports <!--[20]-->. These continuous variables thus
provide a more accurate and detailed description of athletes’
participation patterns. In addition, to investigate relationships between these participation variables and performance, an artifcially dichotomized specialization–diversifcation construct is neither needed nor benefcial. Therefore, we do not follow the dichotomized specialization–diversifcation approach, but rather focus on continuous, quantitative participation variables.
<p align=justify>
The empirical evidence from studies using these continuous predictor variables is mixed... However, when distinguishing studies based on the performance levels compared and whether the samples were junior (youth) or senior (adults competing in the open-age category, typically in their 20s and 30s) athletes, some consistency became apparent <!--[22, 23]-->. In numerous studies, higher junior performance was correlated with a faster rate of childhood/adolescent performance progress, greater amounts of main-sport coach-led practice, and less other-sports practice. By contrast, studies comparing the highest adult performance levels—senior world class and national class—suggested that world-class performance was associated with greater amounts of (earlier, childhood/adolescent) other-sports coach-led practice and slower childhood/adolescent progress and was uncorrelated or negatively correlated with the amount of main-sport coach-led practice.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[1401]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
2 Methods
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[1405]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
3 Results
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[1409]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
4 Discussion
</h4>
<p align=justify>
Across diferent types of sports, analyses revealed five central fndings that answered our research questions.
<ol type="1">
<li>
<!--
1.
-->
Participation patterns predicted performance. ...
<!--
Moreover, childhood/adolescent participation patterns predicted
long-term adult performance.
-->
</li>
<li>
<!--
2.
-->
Compared with their national-class counterparts, senior world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent coach-led practice in sports other than their main sport and, relatedly, began playing their main sport later; accumulated less main-sport practice; and reached performance milestones in their main sport at a slower rate.
</li>
<li>
<!--
3.
-->
Predictors of junior-age performance were opposite of those of senior-age performance: ...
<!--
higher youth-age performance was associated with an earlier start of playing the main sport; greater amounts of main-sport practice but less other-sports practice; and a faster rate of achieving milestones.
-->
</li>
<li>
<!--
4.
-->
Peer-led play in either the athlete’s main sport or in other sports had negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.
</li>
<li>
<!--
5.
-->
Efects of age to reach milestones, starting age, amount of main-sport practice, and amount of other-sports practice were not independent but were closely associated with one another.
</li>
</ol>
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
4.1 Theoretical Implications
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
...The data indicate that athletes whose development was particularly accelerated in childhood/adolescence—typically through intensive specialized main-sport practice—were frequent among the eventual senior national-class athletes (and also among the most successful junior athletes) but were infrequent among the eventual senior
world-class performers.
<p align=justify>
[1410]
<p align=justify>
How can this complex and partly counterintuitive pattern of fndings be explained? ... The aforementioned concepts—deliberate practice, deliberate play, and giftedness <!--[8, 11, 16, 17]--> —are partly consistent with the predictors of junior performance. However, they do not provide adequate approaches to explain the highest adult performance levels, primarily because their central premises are inconsistent with the empirical evidence. Alternatively, we suggest that approaches from neoclassical economics may provide a fruitful heuristic, especially the concepts of efficiency and sustainability.
<p align=justify>
...
<ol type="1">
<li>
<!--
1.
-->
The goal is to achieve success at international senior championships,...
<!--
which has a greater value than junior success (publicity, prestige, income of prize money, sponsorships, public funding).
-->
However, international senior success is an extremely scarce good...
<!--
that many compete for but only few achieve.
-->
An athlete’s career is therefore characterized by great uncertainty of success.
</li>
<li>
<!--
2.
-->
Resources are restricted and must be economized:...
<!--
available time (time demands of education, sleep, meals; length of athletic career), the athlete’s body, load tolerance, health, coaching, facilities.
-->
</li>
<li>
<!--
3.
-->
...
<!--
Sport activities yield short- and long-term benefts, costs, and risks. For example, during childhood/adolescence,
greater amounts of previous main-sport practice are typically associated with higher current performance. But
the accumulated main-sport practice is also associated
with the costs of diminishing future response to practice,
accumulating opportunity costs (i.e., the lost beneft of
foregone other activities), and increased (future) risks
of overtraining and overuse injury.
-->
Coaches and athletes pursue the participation pattern that yields the optimal ratio of benefts, costs, and risks over the short and long term; i.e., a classical problem of the optimization of the
allocation of resources. ...
<!--
Further, benefts, costs, and risks differ over the short and long term; i.e., a classical problem of sustainability.
-->
</li>
<li>
<!--
4.
-->
Because (1) resources are limited and (2) one endeavors to increase benefits while limiting costs and risks, the efficiency of practice is paramount. In economic terms: the marginal productivity, Δ performance / Δ practice over time, see Eq. 1. Following the Gossenian law of
diminishing marginal productivity <!--[51, 52]-->, the more main-sport practice previously accumulated, the lower the added gain in performance per added unit of mainsport practice <!--(see Eq. 2)-->.
</li>
<li>
<!--
5.
-->
The higher the competition level, the greater the value of every unit of absolute performance improvement: small differences in absolute performance (velocity run, distance jumped, successful shots made) make
great diferences to an athlete’s championship level and placing, i.e., relative performance. For example, at an international level, 0.1 s in a race may distinguish the gold medalist from a non-medalist. In economic terms, the marginal revenue product increases with age and
competition level <!--(see Eq. 3)-->.
</li>
</ol>
<p align=justify>
[1411]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
...the world-class athletes’ combination of reduced childhood/adolescent investment in specialized main-sport practice with greater diversifed engagement in multi-sport practice was associated with lower initial marginal productivity, but greater sustainability, in that it yielded greater long-term marginal productivity (efficiency of practice, Δ relative performance/Δ practice amount,...<!-- Fig. 5c).-->
<p align=justify>
Notably, world-class athletes’ enhanced efficiency of practice was exactly located in the age period and competition level of the greatest marginal revenue product, i.e., where relatively small differences in absolute performance made great differences in championship level and placing (relative performance)
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Most of this seems inapplicable to music, but I think this last part might be.
<p>
And, uh...hate to say it, but the obvious folk-explanation is that the eventual
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
senior world-class
</mark>
types <i>didn't have to</i> practice in order to
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
achieve success
</mark>
at the
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
junior
</mark>
levels. This is also consistent with
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
neoclassical economics
</mark>
, no?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
... Our economic interpretation is underpinned by three inter-related hypotheses discussed in the literature:
<ol type="1">
<li>
<!--
1.
-->
Childhood/adolescent multi-sport engagement is associated with reduced risks of later overuse injuries and burnout...
<!--(see Bell et al. [50] and Waldron [53] for reviews).-->
</li>
<li>
<!--
2.
-->
Practice and competition experiences in various sports increase the odds that athletes fnd the sport that best matches their talent and preferences...
<!--(economic “search and match theory” [54, 55]; in sports [28, 48]). Individual preferences may include enjoyment, coach–athlete relationship, and peer interaction in a sport, among others. A priori, an athlete’s information on athlete–sports match is vague but is expanded through gaining experience in various sports. That is,
-->
...the “talent identifcation” for a sport occurs a posteriori not a priori...
<!--
[56, 57].
<br>
According to this hypothesis, the (few) senior world-class athletes who specialized early were either talented at multiple sports or fell into an individually suitable sports match largely by luck.</li>
-->
<li>
<!--
3.
-->
Varied learning experiences...
<!--
(tasks, situations, methodologies)
-->
may expand the potential for future long-term learning,...
<!--
i.e., one’s learning capital, in two related ways (i.e., the “learning transfer as preparation for future learning” hypothesis [58]).
-->
First, varied learning experiences facilitate the athlete’s ability to adapt to diferent learning tasks, situations, methodologies, and available information for learning. ...
<!--
The athlete becomes a more adaptive learner and can better exploit learning opportunities [59, 60].
-->
Second, the athlete experiences various learning designs that vary in efficacy for the individual athlete; these experiences help them understand individually more and less athlete-functional learning solutions...
<!--
[48, 58]. At the same time, these experiences may
-->
<br><br>
[1412 (visuals)]
<br>
...
<br>
[1413]
<br><br>
...
<!--
facilitate the athlete’s competencies for self-regulation in learning (see Jordet [61] for a review).
-->
</li>
</ol>
<p align=justify>
According to these hypotheses, athletes who engage in excess childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice may more likely be hampered by (later) overuse injuries and/or burnout, may have a greater risk of “malinvestment” in a suboptimal sports match, and may have limited opportunities to expand their learning capital for future long-term learning. In contrast, senior world-class athletes’ pattern of childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice with relatively less main-sport practice was likely associated with reduced risks of (later) overuse injury and/or burnout, increased odds that they selected a main sport at which they are particularly talented, and improved long-term perceptual–motor skill learning.
<p align=justify>
The hypotheses are also supported by three fndings from several previous studies...
<!--
[22, 25, 26, 31, 46–48, 62–66]:
-->
(1) Childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice did not have a
direct effect on main-sport performance but had a delayed moderator effect, such that it facilitated the athlete’s later main-sport efficiency of practice; (2) the effect rested on improved later perceptual–motor learning, not physical development; (3) the effect was not moderated by the relatedness of the different sports an athlete engaged in. ...
<!--
Further, the present fnding that multi-sport coach-led practice, but not peer-led play, facilitated long-term senior performance provides additional support for our second and third
hypotheses.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<h4>
4.2 Methodological Considerations
</h4>
<p align=justify>
The study has several strengths,... But it does have limitations. First, the retrospective and correlational design of many original studies may not have controlled for potential confounds
or selection effects (e.g., survivor bias). ...
<!--
Thus, although temporal precedence of activities on later performance is suggestive, the original study designs do not allow us to draw causal conclusions.
-->
Nevertheless, the major findings are entirely consistent with recent studies that controlled for potential confounds through matched-pairs designs and multivariate analyses,...
<!--
including multi-year quasi-experiments [24–28, 46–48, 64].
-->
Second, we did not consider the “micro-structure” of an athlete’s main-sport practice (e.g., types of exercises, ways of executing them). However, several studies reported consistent findings from athletes who
participated in the same training groups and thus the same
main-sport practice...
<!--
[22, 26, 31, 67–70].
-->
Third, we did not analyze potential interactions of other factors with participation patterns, such as athletes’ genotype, gene–environment interaction, familial support, or psychological characteristics. Fourth, male samples were over-represented and female samples were under-represented...
<!--
(67 and 33% of all participants, respectively). Other than age, sex, and country, studies generally did not report further demographic
characteristics relevant to diversity. Additionally, relatively few studies involved samples from Africa and Central/South America, from combat sports and artistic composition sports, and from Paralympic sports. Furthermore, among junior game-sport samples, male soccer players were overrepresented.
-->
Fifth, sample sizes and statistical power varied across meta-analytic models. Sixth, as in any systematic review and meta-analysis, although we used multiple databases, bias of availability, country, and language was possible. Finally, the quality of evidence was low for main-sport play and other-sports play.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
Jonathan S. Daniels, David Moreau and Brooke N. Macnamara
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364557286_Learning_and_Transfer_in_Problem_Solving_Progressions?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InByb2ZpbGUifX0">Learning and Transfer in Problem Solving Progressions</a>
<br>
(2022)
<blockquote>
<h4>
1. Introduction
</h4>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
People are often challenged when having to learn new skills in a limited amount of time. In many cases, the most efficient way to learn a skill is to break it down to its core components and gradually increase complexity. ...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
However, not all learning occurs from early, formal instruction... Without guided instruction, we typically apply various solutions to new situations often making numerous errors
<!--
(Ebbinghaus 1913)
-->
. Slowly, patterns that lead to more directed and efficient manners of problem-solving are discovered
<!--
(Fitts and Posner 1967)
-->
. ...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
... One important component in the study of learning and memory is the transfer of learning—the idea that the concepts learned from one situation can be applied to another
<!--
(Woodworth and Thorndike 1901)
-->
. Numerous studies have shown that transfer of learning through training can improve one’s performance on more complex tasks
<!--
(e.g., Broadbent et al. 2015; Meneghetti et al. 2017; Nayigizente and Richard 2000; Schiff and Vakil 2015; Vakil and Heled 2016)
-->
.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
The transfer of learning can be divided into two types: near and far transfer. Near transfer—the application of learned situations to new, yet similar situations (as opposed to far transfer, which is associated with new and relatively different situations;...
<p align=justify>
[2 of 13]
<p align=justify>
...—has often been studied for its application to spatial problems...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Spatial problem-solving is considered a key component in a number of performance domains...
...only a small percentage of studies <i>[of the "Tower of Hanoi" spatial task]</i> has investigated training progressions,... The schema theory of discrete motor learning posits that schemas form as rules and parameters that are compared to novel situations. ... In support of the theory of discrete motor learning, Vakil and Heled (2016) found that participants in the varied training condition yielded better learning transfer than participants in the constant training condition.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
However, in spatial problem-solving tasks, it has yet to be tested what type of varied training leads to better transfer. ... Outside of spatial problem-solving, a working-memory training study (von Bastian and Eschen 2016) suggested that random variation may be sufficient.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
von Bastian and Eschen (2016) were not the first to suggest that random variation may be beneficial for learning and perhaps more so than progressive sequences. ... According to schema theory
<!--
(Schmidt 1975; Wulf and Schmidt 1988)
-->
, variability in practice is beneficial because it enhances the effectiveness of rules (schemata). ...
<br><br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
<i>Present Study</i>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
We specifically chose the Rubik’s Cube for its difficulty. Whereas the Tower of Hanoi is fairly simple and training gains are easily found, only six percent of the global population has solved a Rubik’s Cube
<!--
(Vega 2018)
-->
. ...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[3 of 13]
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<h4>
2. Materials and Methods
</h4>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[6 of 13]
<h4>
3. Results
</h4>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[9 of 13]
<p align=justify>
...
<h4>
4. Discussion
</h4>
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
... Our results demonstrated no difference between the progression and variable-order conditions. However, we also did not find that participants in these conditions outperformed participants in the consistent-difficulty condition, limiting the support our results offer for suggesting any variability is important
<!--
(von Bastian and Eschen 2016)
-->
or for the schema theory of discrete motor skill learning, which also suggests participants should yield better transfer from varied versus consistent training.
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Our results support our hypothesis that participants’ fluid reasoning would be positively correlated with performance on the spatial reasoning test, across conditions. ...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
...our results are in line with other studies that have found that spatial reasoning predicts performance but does not interact with the type of training. ...
<p align=justify style="text-indent: 4%">
Considering the results of Vakil and Heled (2016), in which varied training on the Tower of Hanoi led to better schematic representation of the problem, we believe the lack of a superior method of learning may arise from the difficulty of the Rubik’s Cube. ...
<p align=justify>
[10 of 13]
<p align=justify>
...it may also be the case that varied training may be paradigm specific rather than widespread across spatial reasoning problems.
</p>
</blockquote>
<br><br>
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-->Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-1327418936215212132024-03-14T18:05:00.000-07:002024-03-14T18:05:30.629-07:00Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (ii)<br>
<p>
Constant Lambert
<br>
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
<br>
(1934)
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
[201]<br>
<font size=5>
<center>
(g) The Spirit of Jazz
</center>
</font>
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
By jazz, of course, I mean the whole movement roughly designated as such, and not merely that section of it known as Afro-American, or more familiarly as 'Harlem'. The negro once enjoyed a monopoly of jazz, just as England once enjoyed a monopoly of the industrial revolution, but for the negroes to imagine that all jazz is their native province is as if an Englishman were to imagine that all locomotives were built by his compatriots. Even the Harlem section of jazz is by no means so African as might be supposed.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[202] ... The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices, and the more the European tries to imagine himself 'down on the Delta' the more the negro tries to imagine himself in an aristocratic salon. In this connection, it is amusing to recall the situation that arose recently when a well-known negro-dance arranger
<p align=justify>
[203]
<p align=justify>
was called in to produce a ballet for a highbrow company trained in the classical tradition. While all the Europeans flung aside their carefully won training to indulge in an orgy of pseudo-Charlestons the negro himself was moved to tears, not by his own work but by the classic elegance of <i>Lac des Cygnes</i>.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[205] ... The phrase 'barber-shop chord'—which denotes a chord of unusual succulence—dates back to the days when a guitar hung in every negro barber's shop, and a client who was waiting would vamp about on the instrument until at a lucky <i>trouvaile</i> everyone would shout 'Hold that chord'. It need hardly be pointed out that this type of harmonic experiment is as sophisticated in its method as that of the contemporary composers who—deny it hotly though they may—compose 'at the piano'.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements. ...
<p align=justify>
[206]
<p align=justify>
The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...
<p align=justify>
... Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully. The valse has received august patronage from Beethoven onwards, it is true, but the valses of the nineteenth-century composers are either
<p align=justify>
[207]
<p align=justify>
definite examples of unbending or definite examples of sophistication—sometimes both. ... In the nineteenth century the split between the classical and popular came between a follower of Liszt, let us say, and a follower of Gungl. Today the split occurs between a composer like Kurt Weill and a composer like Jarnach—both of them pupils of Busoni.
<p align=justify>
The same rapprochement between highbrow and lowbrow—both meeting in an emotional <i>terrain vague</i>—can be seen in literature. <i>[e.g. Eliot]</i> ...
<p align=justify>
[208]
<p align=justify>
The words of jazz songs mark the first popularization of that well-known modern vice—the Inferiority Complex. Until recently a certain exuberant self-confidence has usually formed the spiritual background of a popular tune. ... A general air of physical attractiveness, sexual bounce and financial independence is naturally assumed by the writers of pre-war song hits. ...
<p align=justify>
In modern songs it is taken for granted that one is poor, unsuccessful, and either sex-starved or unable to hold the affections of such partner as one may have had the luck to pick up. ... For the most part...the heroes and heroines of modern songs meet with the rebuffs they deserve and take refuge in the unmute reproach of 'Ain't misbehavin' ', and 'Mean to Me',...
<p align=justify>
[208]
<p align=justify>
... The other side of the medal, the series of crazy words, crazy tune numbers, with their assumed galvanic energy has an equally neurasthenic basis. The so-called 'hot' songs are as depressing as the so-called 'sweet'; they spring from no genuine gaiety such as inspires the marches of Sousa, the sardanas of Bou and the valses of Waldteufel—they are a desperate attempt to hide an underlying boredom and malaise.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Well, one does wonder if the author has not badly misjudged all of this simply for ignorance of <i>The Blues</i> as a major tributary.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[210] In point of fact, jazz has long ago lost the simple gaiety and sadness of the charming savages to whom it owes its birth, and is now for the most part a reflection of the jagged nerves, sex repressions, inferiority complexes and general dreariness of the modern scene. ... The negro associations of jazz, the weary traveller, the comforting old mammy, the red-hot baby, have become a formula of expression only, as empty and convenient as the harlequin and columbine of the nineteenth century.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
reflection
</mark>
theory rears its ugly head. That is, it's an "ugly" theory when someone else is articulating it. When we ourselves want to appeal to it, it's just obvious And if we are "journalists who can do some advanced math," then it may become <i>sociology.</i>
<!--
<p>
To be sure, this last part ("formula of expression" as against a living art form) does seem like it can be approached objectively.
</p>
-->
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[212] ...the only jazz music of technical importance is that small section of it that is genuinely negroid. The 'hot' negro records still have a genuine and not merely galvanic energy, while the blues have a certain austerity that places them far above the sweet nothings of George Gershwin.
<p align=justify>
The difficulty of estimating the contribution of the negro to jazz is largely due to the fact that a jazz record, unlike a valse by Johann Strauss, is rarely the work of one man; more often than not it is the work of three composers and three arrangers plus a number of frills
that are put on by the players at the spur of the moment. Of this synod only one member may be coloured and usually the negro element is confined to the actual arabesques of the execution. These arabesques may be of the most fascinating order; but the fact remains that they are improvisations over an accepted basis and not true composition at all. (It is the greatest mistake to class Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington together as similar exponents of negro music—the one is a trumpet player, the other a genuine composer.)
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
A
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
difficulty
</mark>
indeed, one which is ever harder to come to terms with as ever more comes to be riding on
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
jazz
</mark>
as a marker of group identity (racial or otherwise) in a big, scary, heterodox social world.
<p>
Individualism did eventually establish itself in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
jazz
</mark>
, and at that point jazz became (predictably so, I would grant; unfortunately so, I would not) significantly less popular until it was no longer
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
popular
</mark> in either/any sense. As it turns out,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
genuine composer</mark>s
of any style or race are decidedly unpopular. The rest of this bluster pales in importance to that reality.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[219] It is often suggested that jazz rhythm, though exhilarating at first, ends by becoming monotonous through its being merely a series of irregular groupings and cross-accents over a steady and unyielding pulse. This is true in a way, and certainly nothing is more wearisome than the mechanical division of the eight quavers of the foxtrot bar into groups of three, three and two; yet in the best negro jazz bands the irregular cross-accents are given so much more weight than the underlying pulse, that the rhythmic arabesques almost completely obscure the metrical framework, and paradoxically enough this 'bar line' music often achieves a rhythmic freedom that recalls the music of Elizabethan times and earlier, when the bar line was a mere technical convenience like a figure or letter in a score. On paper the rhythmical groupings of a tune like 'Step on the Blues' (from The Girl Friend) bear a striking resemblance to the irregular
groupings to be found in the music of Edmund Turges (circa 1500) who, it need hardly be added, was roundly condemned for his metrical eccentricities by the august Dr. Burney.
<p align=justify>
We make a mistake in considering these rhythmic arabesques abnormal or artificial. It is the lack of rhythmic experiment shown in the nineteenth century that is really abnormal—at least as regards English music and the setting of English words. Without wish-
<p align=justify>
[220]
<p align=justify>
ing in any way to denigrate the magnificent achievement of the German romantic school from Weber to Mahler, we can without exaggeration say that it is remarkably deficient in purely rhythmic interest. Wagner himself was conscious of this failing and admitted it with a deprecatory 'Well you can't expect everything' air.
<p align=justify>
Yet we in this country have a musical upbringing based on the German classics plus a strong leavening of hymns—'ancient and modern'. We still go on setting English poetry in the totally unsuitable rhythms drawn from the German Volkslied. Actually, had not the
course of English music been interrupted first by Handel and then, more gravely, by Mendelssohn, we should probably have found the rhythmic tradition of English music very much more eccentric and more full of 'conceits' than the tradition of jazz. As it is, certain jazz songs show a more apt feeling for the cadence of English speech than any music since the seventeenth century.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[235] The principal objections to music provided by the now almost universal loud speaker are its monotony and unsuitability. Whereas you can escape from a mechanical piano by going to the next café, you can rarely escape from a B.B.C. gramophone hour by going to the next public house because they are almost bound to be presenting the same entertainment to their clients.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The whole of London, whatever it is doing, and whatever its moods, is made to listen to the choice of a privileged few or even a privileged one.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
To take a privileged example of Mr. Christopher Stone whose well-modulated voice has doubtless given pleasure to millions. At certain hours of the day, it is impossible for anyone to escape from his breezy diffidence. That he is a benevolent autocrat I am sure is true, just as I am sure that his choice of records is reasonably intelligent and eclectic. But the fact remains that he enjoys
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a position of dictatorship
</mark>
as fantastic as anything in
<p align=justify>
[236]
<p align=justify>
Aldous Huxley's <i>Brave New World</i>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
This framing of "mass" culture in capital-P Political terms is apt, and also notably ahead of its time.
<p>
McLuhan was
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/06/mcluhanthe-great-withholding.html">familiar</a>
with this book by 1951 (but presumably earlier). He later
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/06/mcluhanmass-as-simultaneity.html">emphasized</a>
the temporal ("simultaneous in time") aspect of "mass" culture.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[238] In previous ages, listening to music was a matter of personal choice usually involving either individual skill in joining with other people in singing a madrigal, or at least the concentration, and sacrifice of time and money, required by a cycle of <i>The Ring</i>. But now no one can avoid listening to music... It is even more trying for the musical than for the non-musical; it is impossible for them to escape from their profession or relaxation, as the case may be.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
And again, the question of <i>abstention</i> is capital-P Political in a way that no one anymore seems capable of grasping or even noticing. It was more noticable in 1934! Still, this is a notably prescient passage.
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[239] Although excessive sonority has lost its thrill, we still demand it as an ever-increasing factor in our lives. It is noticeable, indeed, that those who business lives are most surrounded by extraneous noises are those who most insist on the continuous support of gramophone and loud speaker during their leisure hours. We live in an age of tonal debauch where the blunting of the finer edge of pleasure leads only to a more hysterical and frenetic attempt to recapture it.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[240] It is well known that, even in so unintellectual a matter as eating and drinking, people soon acquire a preference for synthetic products. Those who are used to tinned Canadian salmon have little use for fresh Scotch salmon, and those who are used to certain types of London beer would be nonplussed by a drink that was actually brewed from malt and hops. It will, on the same principle, be of the utmost interest to see if the repeal of Prohibition in U.S.A. will lessen the taste for 'hooch' or not.
<p align=justify>
So it is with canned music. Certain composers, notably Milhaud, make no secret of their preference for the timbres of the tone film. I have heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter, who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two-dimensional effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound instead of escaping round the hall came straight at you and had 'a frame round it'. These remarks would not be worth quoting were they not typical of a large and increasing class of music-fanciers.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
If only he knew how bad it would get! But what can ya do?
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[243] It is doubtful whether the mechanical picturesque is so great an improvement on the romantic picturesque. Honegger's <i>Pacific 231</i>, <i>Skating Rink</i> and <i>Rugby</i>, Mossoloff's <i>Song of the Machines</i>, Martinu's <i>Half-Time</i> and Prokofieff's <i>Le Pas d'Acier</i> are, au fond, as sentimental in conception as the lyric pieces of Grieg. Honegger, indeed, has claimed that <i>Pacific 231</i> sets out to capture the lyricism of an express train moving at top speed. Unfortunately this lyricism has been overlaid by the mechanically picturesque onomatopœics of the piece, and the nostalgia of the train journey is lost in a study of escaping steam and jolting points. A little more thought might have told the composer that music, which depends on varying degrees of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
stylized
</mark>
noise and speed for its expression, is, on the face of it, the last medium in which to attempt an evocation of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
non-stylized
</mark>
noise and speed (there are few pieces more essentially static than Debussy's <i>Mouvement</i>, for example).
<p align=justify>
The objection to realism in music is not that it makes things
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
too easy
</mark>
for the listener but that it makes them
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
too difficult
</mark>
. Instead of receiving an immediate and incisive physical impression he receives a vaguely visual one, which has to be related back to early associations and personal experience before it produces the emotional reaction which the music should have evoked directly. It is for the composer, not the listener, to digest the raw material of his inspiration.
<p align=justify>
[244]
<p align=justify>
There is no reason whatsoever why the composer should not derive inspriration from trains, aeroplanes, moving staircases, penny-in-the-slot machines and other triumphs of mind over matter, provided these sources of inspiration are so
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
absorbed and transformed
</mark>
that the final result produces a directly musical reaction. In a work for the stage this is not necessarily so, for there the eye can implement the oral suggestions. The brilliant realism of <i>Petrushka</i> is thoroughly legitimate when performed, as intended, in the theater. But in the concert hall a work like Debussy's <i>Fêtes</i> produces by purely musical means a far greater effect of speed and gaiety than Stravinsky's onomatopœics.
<p align=justify>
The place for music of the Honegger type is not the concert hall but the cinema. Those who are bored by <i>Pacific 231</i> in the concert hall would have been surprised at the brilliant effect it made when used in conjunction with the Soviet film <i>The Blue Express</i>.
<p align=justify>
The present vogue for mechanical realism, being based primarily on the picturesque aspects of machinery, is bound to disappear as the mechanic more and more comes to resemble the bank clerk, and as the Turner-esque steam engine gives way to the unphotogenic electric train. It is only comparatively primitive machinery that affords a stimulus, and there is already a faint period touch about <i>Pacific 231</i> and <i>Le Pas d'Acier</i>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
This aesthetic angle is worth keeping in mind re: Mumford's account of the path-dependence by which big, clumsy, inefficient machines were continuing to predominate long after better ones became available. This path-dependence is economic and political, certainly, but perhaps also aesthetic. The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
electric train
</mark>
is indeed quite puny, unimpressive, sterile, etc. compared to heavy rail, even now. Trainspotting is alive and well, at least in Fullerton, CA. This I can report from ample firsthand observation.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
One feels that they should have been written when railways and factories really were beginning to alter our lives; that Prokofieff should have written ballets about the spinning jenny and the Luddite riots; that Honegger
<p align=justify>
[245]
<p align=justify>
should have been there to celebrate the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway... Our latter-day mechanical romanticists are indeed only filling in a corner which—save for a few ludicrous exceptions...—was left unexploited by the nineteenth century aesthetic romanticists.
<p align=justify>
It may seem contradictory to condemn composers like Honegger for basing their work on the contemporary scene after complaining that the neo-classicists are so out of touch with contemporary life. But works like Honegger's symphonic movements are only in touch with certain purely decorative and ephemeral aspects of contemporary living. They have no spiritual foundation even of a meretricious order. Prokofieff's <i>Le Pas d'Acier</i>, for all its realism, tells us less about proletarian Russia than the comparatively stylized and abstract <i>Les Noces</i>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Ok, well...I really do think that if we had to formally litigate everyone's
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
spiritual foundation
</mark>
in the manner of a U.S. civil trial, there would be not only "a lot of dead copycats" as Mingus said of Parker's imitators, but also "whole prisons full of libelers." Or at least that's how it would start out, and then pretty quickly people would stop saying things like this unless they could really, truly be proven.
<p>
In other words, if any of this mattered a lick, no one would dare say such ridiculous things as this. But for better or worse, a composer's "spiritual foundation" matters not a lick to anyone but our writer here and the ocassional odd sociologist.
</p>
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<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Realistic fantasias have always been a minor part of music, but they lose their savour so rapidly that we are apt to forget they were written in past ages at all, and imagine they are the particular province of the present day. We think of <i>Rugby</i> as representing 'the new spirit in music', yet that great critic Roger North writing in the early eighteenth century says, 'But it is very possible that the thoughts of some folks may run upon a dance, ye herry of footbal play, ye mad folks at bedlam or mortall Battells at Bear Garden, all wch Bizzarie ye masters of musick will undertake to represent, and many persons that doe not well distinguish between real good and evil, but are hurried away by caprice, as in a
<b><u>...missing next page...</u></b>
</blockquote>
</font>
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<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[248] Hindemith's technique is indeed a gymnastic technique, and his attitude towards 'expressive' music is reminiscent of an instructor in physical jerks pooh-poohing the poses and affectations of ballet—even though they may demand a higher degree of training than he himself possesses.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[249] ... As it is felt by some of his followers that Hindemith's music has been somewhat unduly saddled with the description of Gebrauchsmusik—bread-and-butter music, workaday, or utility music are perhaps the best English equivalents—it is as well to quote the artistic credo of the master himself. Hindemith calls himself a craftsman, never a tone poet, and has said that 'a composer should never write unless he is acquainted with the demand for his work. The times of consistent composing
<p align=justify>
[250]
<p align=justify>
for one's own satisfaction are probably gone for ever.'
<p align=justify>
This anti-aesthetic
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Notable verbiage here. Notable application too.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
no-nonsense-about-me type of argument is so superficially palatable at the present day that few people seem to have given it sufficient attention to realize its patent fallacies. Like most of the decadent movements in modern music, Gebrauchsmusik is based on a misapprehension of the medium in which the composer expresses himself.
<p align=justify>
In literature, the man who has neither the vision, the imagination, the sense of beauty or the wit that are popularly supposed to go to the production of a poem, novel or play, can turn his literary skill, such as it is, to the production of advertisements, book reviews and crime reports. He is a utility or workaday writer. In painting, the same type of man, able to use a pencil and brush with some skill without attempting to be a Cézanne or a Picasso, can profitably and pleasantly spend his time in such varied ways as the designing of book jackets, the faking of old masters and the painting of presentation portraits. In the three-dimensional arts one can distinguish even more clearly between art and craft, and the carpenter who makes a chair can claim to be satisfying a universal demand which is not met by the sculptor. A chair is undoubtedly more comfortable to sit on that all save a few examples of the sculptor's art. But in music there can be no such thing as a chair as opposed to a painting, or the craftsman opposed to the pure artist.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
The advent of "sound design," be it of the conceptual/gallery variety or the entertainment industry variety, in fact reinforces the point rather than contradicting it.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The whole theory of utility music is based on the misconception that one can distinguish between the aesthe</mark>-
<p align=justify>
[251]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
tic and the useful in this particular medium.
</mark>
Apart from music for organized and non-aesthetic action such as military marches and foxtrots—which, typically enough, Hindemith has not written—
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
music is only useful if it is good music
</mark>, whether light or serious. Unless it provides one with some vital experience which no other art can convey it is not only useless but a nuissance.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The objective craftsman that Hindemith sets up as an ideal is far more of a sentimental luxury than the despised aesthetic 'tone poet'.
</mark>
His daily covering of music paper is a task as essentially fruitless as those strange tasks assigned to the innocent dupes in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, the man in 'The Red-headed League' who copied out the <i>Encyclopaedia Brittanica</i> or the stockbroker's clerk who was set to making a list of the pottery firms in Paris.
<p align=justify>
If we examine Hindemith's second statement we find an even more striking fallacy. With an altogether praiseworthy modesty Hindemtith appears to imagine that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
by ceasing to write for his own satisfaction he is necessarily writing for the satisfaction of others
</mark>
. There is an old and trite saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else will', and in music it may with equal truth be said that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
if a composer is not interested in his own music he can hardly expect others to be
</mark>
. Even the most nauseating of popular tunes, that would appear to be written solely with the desire to satisfy the public taste at its least critical and most mawkish, must mean something to the composer, and be primarily written for his satisfaction, if it is to 'get to the public'. Purely 'occasional' music whether deliberately vulgar or deliberately re-
<p align=justify>
[252]
<p align=justify>
fined always brings boredom and distrust in its wake. Unless the composer has some definite reason for putting pen to paper, he had far better play patience or do a little gardening.
<p align=justify>
It is this refusal to make music for its own sake that is responsible for the passionate sincerity and popular success of Puccini's operas, in spite of all their vulgarity. The followers of Hindemith may shudder at this instance, but after all Puccini, as a superb craftsman who certainly satisfied a popular demand, should theoretically speaking be one of their idols; otherwise they are convicted of an antisentimental bias which is the reverse of objective.
<p align=justify>
Hindemith is equally mistaken when he imagines that the writing of music is governed by the laws of supply and demand.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
There is no regular demand for musical material as there is for writing material or boxes of matches; there is only a demand for something which creates its own demand
</mark>
—a good piece of music in fact.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
He's basically right, but now "permission culture" has contrived a glaring exception, as if desperate to retroactively validate the Marketing Orientation: there is in fact a need for sound-alikes, or if not actually sound-alikes then something functionally the same in that it is called upon to stand in for another more famous and therefore more expensive soundpiece. No one would deny that the original is almost always better. The fact is, when the original is also more expensive to license, a cheaper substitute will be made-for-hire. So, there is in fact "no regular demand" here that has not already been met (nowadays copiously); but there <i>is</i> the "regular demand" (really it's <i>redundant</i> or "contrived" demand) of The Industry for usable material they can own the rights to. And of course, even so, no one should confuse this with Writing For An Audience. You are writing for the producer, who is merely the luckbox gone longest between random failures.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
By all means let us have as many new piano concertos as possible, provided they are equal to, or superior to, those in the standard repertory.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
The sound-alike paradigm all but guarantees inferiority and redundancy, even where the artists are top-shelf.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
There is no specific demand, however, for a new concerto as such, irrespective of quality. A pianist does not ask for a new piano concerto as he does for a new pair of shoes, giving the old one away to an amateur.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Well,...now
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
he
</mark>
<i>does</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ask
</mark>
. And this <i>is</i> to everyone's detriment, for all the reasons enumerated above.
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Concertos may wear thin in the course of time, but handsewn leather is better than mass-produced cardboard.
</blockquote>
</font>
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<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<b><u>[[need p. 259]]</u></b><br>
<p align=justify>
[260] of this type will, in the future, open up to the minor composer the same outlet that the designing of posters opens up to the minor painter. In the meanwhile the composer of merit is welll advised to regard the wireless as a possible adjunct to his income rather than as a tenth Muse.
</p>
</blockquote>
</font>
-->
<p>
...
</p>
<!--
<p>
My note here says:
<br>
Interesting thesis
</p>
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<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
[268]<br>
<font size=5>
<center>
(e) The Disappearing Middlebrow
</center>
</font>
<p align=justify>
To return abruptly from the surrealist future to the all too real present, it may be asked in what way Hindemith and his followers are fitted to deal with the
<p align=justify>
[269]
<p align=justify>
mechanical mediums as they stand today. There is nothing impertinent in such a question. If a man announces that he has resigned from his job it is only natural, and indeed sympathetic, to enquire 'And what do you propose to do now?' Most modern musical criticism is no more than a futile examination of surface texture for the reason that it stops short of the ultimate and inescapable 'and then what?'
<p align=justify>
Without wishing to set up an hypothetical criterion, it is only reasonable to ask what future lies in store for the composers of Gebrauchsmusik if they are to live up to their declared convictions. Hindemith having turned his back on the composer as poet for the few, we must see if he is in any way fitted for the post of composer as hack for the many. If a man says he is a craftsman we have a right to ask what he can make. We do not judge a mechanic by the cut of his dungarees but by his manual ability, and it would seem that Hindemith is as little suited to lulling the senses of the stupid as he is to arousing the interest of the intelligent.
<p align=justify>
The surrealist film is of the future, and the symphonic silent film is of the past. At the present moment the only opportunities for the cinema composer—apart from preludial fanfares, short semi-realistic sequences in shots of machinery, etc.—lie in the definite musical film either of the Eddie Cantor revue type or the René Clair operetta type. Hindemith and his followers are patently incapable of tackling such a task, in that they lack all the geniality of melodic invention that is required of composer of this type of music.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
There is no test so
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[270]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
merciless as a 'theme song'
</mark>
—either it is good or it isn't. There's no getting away from failure by describing it as a pregnant thematic fragment. Emotion of some sort is demanded of the least of composers and even synthetic sentiment, the musical equivalent of glycerine tears, is harder to achieve than abstraction. Abstract music is only suited to that dismal and fruitless branch of entertainment, the abstract film.
<p align=justify>
It is difficult indeed to see what precise function is fulfilled by the composers of Gebrauchsmusik, for all their superficial air of practicality and efficiency. Their technical dexterity is undeniable, but it exists in a vacuum. The poor creatures are all dressed up with nowhere to go.
<p align=justify>
A composer like Hindemith, although essentially a minor figure, is of considerable importance, however, as a symbol of the modern artist who, having lost or thrown aside the spiritual background of the romantic artist, has signally failed to adapt himself to the physical background of modern life. He is neither a good wife nor an attractive whore—the adjectives are interchangeable. Incapable of the spiritual and technical concentration that has gone to such works as Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, Alban Berg's <i>Lyric Suite</i>, or Van Dieren's <i>Sonetto VII of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti</i>, to name at random three of the masterpieces of our time, he is equally incapable of the melodic fertility and the ability to synthesize popular sentiment that we find in a work like Kurt Weill's <i>Seven Deadly Sins</i>, not to mention such genuinely popular
<p align=justify>
[271]
<p align=justify>
pieces as Duke Ellington's <i>Mood Indigo</i> or Cole Porter's <i>Love for Sale</i>. There is hardly a work of his which, to use a hackneyed phrase, does not fall spectacularly 'between two stools'. It is permissible to take as a fair example the Philharmonic Concerto that he wrote for the Jubilee of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. ... Its combination of natural aridity with deliberate virtuosity is indeed most displeasing. Exhibitionism is only to be tolerated in the physically attractive.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[285] The position in England has...its local vagaries and peculiarities, but it represents roughly the position in which the composer finds himself in every country today. Unable to progress any further in the way of modernity he has not a sufficiently sympathetic or stimulating background to enable him to start afresh or to consolidate his experiments. The stupider composers—to whom, regrettably enough, most of this book
<p align=justify>
[286]
<p align=justify>
has been devoted—escape from the situation either by an empty and wilful pastiche of an older tradition or by an equally fruitless concentration on the purely mechanical and objective sides of their arts. The more intelligent composer is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
forced in on himself
</mark>
and made to over-concentrate on
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
his own musical personality
</mark>
, a process which is inclined to be dangerous and sterilizing.
<p align=justify>
The premature senility of so many modern composers can mainly be ascribed to this concentration on purely personal mannerisms. Most of the great figures of the past have been content to leave their personal imprint on the <i>materia music</i> of the day without remodelling it entirely.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
It is only the minor figure whose every bar is recognizable,
</mark>
just as it is only the minor painter, like Marie Laurencin, whose handiwork can be detected at a hundred yards. The number of musical devices, turns of phrase and tricks of rhythm that composer can appropriate to himself alone, is surprisingly few, and a refusal to lose caste by vulgarly moving outside these self-imposed barriers results in a similarly narrow and restricted content.
<p align=justify>
This can clearly be seen in the case of Béla Bartók. Though one respects the spiritual integrity that has led to his self-concentration, one cannot help feeling that his later works are a warning of the dangers of too great subjectivity on the part of the composer. The austere but impressive line which gave such strength to the opera <i>Bluebeard's Castle</i> has by now been fined down to a barbaric minimum of inflection, while the stark harmonies that supported it have been concentrated into a
<p align=justify>
[287]
<p align=justify>
percussive cluster of notes. So much that in certain works the limit of intelligibility and concentration is reached, if not passed.
<p align=justify>
A composer must, through the very nature of his art, externalize his emotions to some slight degree. He cannot demand collaboration from his audience while deliberately turning his back on them.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
If only we could count on
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
them
</mark>
to tell the difference.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The obsession with a narrowly personal world of sound that is to be noticed in some of the later works of Bartók—his fourth quartet, for instance—is the musical equivalent of navel gazing on the part of a philosopher.
<p align=justify>
What we require from the composer is neither a contemplation of his own navel, nor a frenzied dashing about in sports cars, but
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an expression of musical personality free from deliberate pastiche—which is escape—or from mechanical revolution—which is submission
</mark>
. The composers, such as Sibelius, Busoni, and Van Dieren, who in different ways represent this spiritual freedom rarely, if ever, form a school and are not usually the most outwardly advanced in style. They are free from the vulgarity of the label, above all the official 'revolutionary' label with which so great a figure as Schönberg has unfortunately been associated.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[313] The element of formal balance provided by the recapitulation that is an integral part of sonata form is one of the greatest stumbling blocks to a sensitive composer—for although he is dealing with time in the abstract he has to express himself with time in the concrete.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
We know from his letters that Mozart conceived his symphonies in a moment of time, that is to say from his point of view the recapitulation did not necessarily come after the development, but that does not alter the fact that the audience will have to hear them in that order.
</mark>
The composer's mind must to some extent resemble that of a scientist who can conceive time according to the theories of Einstein and Dunne, whereas the listener probably shares the mentality of those who conceive time as symbolized by the clock face. The composer may see the whole design at once, as in a framed picture, but the listener can only appreciate it as if being shown a long Chinese picture on rollers, of which only a fragment is visible at one moment. He will be conscious of the repetitions as such, and whether these repetitions—admittedly necessary in one form or another for reasons
<p align=justify>
[314]
<p align=justify>
of balance—strike him as being redundant and tautological depends not only on the quality but on the nature of the music.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
One of my first adolescent theories about all of this was very close to the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
long Chinese picture on rollers
</mark>
theory.
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[331] The artist who is one of a group writes for that group alone, whereas the artist who expresses personal experience may in the end reach universal experience. He must not mind if for the moment he appears to be without an audience. He has no right to complain if Cleopatra prefers billiards. There is always the chance that she
<p align=justify>
[332]
<p align=justify>
may become bored with billiard also, and when she returns to the musician his song will be all the more moving for having been written to please not her but himself.
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>***tomlinson***</h5>
Constant Lambert
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
(1934)
[202] <i>"The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices,..."</i>
[205] <i>"The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements."</i>
[206] <i>"The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...
"...Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully."</i>
<a href="
">more</a>
-->
<!--
<hr>
<h5>***mass***</h5>
Constant Lambert
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
(1934)
[235] <i>"The principal objections to music provided by the now almost universal loud speaker are its monotony and unsuitability. Whereas you can escape from a mechanical piano by going to the next café, you can rarely escape from a B.B.C. gramophone hour by going to the next public house because they are almost bound to be presenting the same entertainment to their clients. The whole of London, whatever it is doing, and whatever its moods, is made to listen to the choice of a privileged few or even a privileged one.
"To take a privileged example of Mr. Christopher Stone whose well-modulated voice has doubtless given pleasure to millions. At certain hours of the day, it is impossible for anyone to escape from his breezy diffidence. That he is a benevolent autocrat I am sure is true, just as I am sure that his choice of records is reasonably intelligent and eclectic. But the fact remains that he enjoys a position of dictatorship as fantastic as anything in
</i>[236]<i>
Aldous Huxley's </i>Brave New World<i>."</i>
-->
<!--
<hr>
<h5>***supernormal stimulus***</h5>
Constant Lambert
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
(1934)
[240] <i>"It is well known that, even in so unintellectual a matter as eating and drinking, people soon acquire a preference for synthetic products. Those who are used to tinned Canadian salmon have little use for fresh Scotch salmon, and those who are used to certain types of London beer would be nonplussed by a drink that was actually brewed from malt and hops. It will, on the same principle, be of the utmost interest to see if the repeal of Prohibition in U.S.A. will lessen the taste for 'hooch' or not.
"So it is with canned music. Certain composers, notably Milhaud, make no secret of their preference for the timbres of the tone film. I have heard a woman of some intelligence and musical training actually state that she preferred the magic tone of the oboe over the wireless to the actual sound of it in the concert hall; and I have heard a painter, who prides himself on his modernity, state that the two-dimensional effect of broadcast music was to be preferred because the sound instead of escaping round the hall came straight at you and had 'a frame round it'. These remarks would not be worth quoting were they not typical of a large and increasing class of music-fanciers."</i>
-->
<!--
<h5>***cake for oneself***</h5>
Constant Lambert
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
(1934)
[250] <i>"The whole theory of utility music is based on the misconception that one can distinguish between the aesthe-
</i>[251]<i>
tic and the useful in this particular medium. Apart from music for organized and non-aesthetic action such as military marches and foxtrots—which, typically enough, Hindemith has not written—music is only useful if it is good music,... The objective craftsman that Hindemith sets up as an ideal is far more of a sentimental luxury than the despised aesthetic 'tone poet'. ...
"... With an altogether praiseworthy modesty Hindemtith appears to imagine that by ceasing to write for his own satisfaction he is necessarily writing for the satisfaction of others. There is an old and trite saying 'If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else will', and in music it may with equal truth be said that if a composer is not interested in his own music he can hardly expect others to be. Even the most nauseating of popular tunes, that would appear to be written solely with the desire to satisfy the public taste at its least critical and most mawkish, must mean something to the composer, and be primarily written for his satisfaction, if it is to 'get to the public'."</i>
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-78647930662686724012024-03-13T17:06:00.000-07:002024-03-13T17:06:08.422-07:00Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (i) <br>
<p>
Constant Lambert
<br>
<i>Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline</i>
<br>
(1934)
</p>
<br><br>
<hr>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[21] During the war people had sterner things to think of than Schönberg, and a concert of his works would have been not only impracticable, but unpatriotic. The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
general cessation of musical activities during the war
</mark> resulted in many pre-war works only becoming known a considerable number of years after they were written. This may seem platitudinous, but it should be remembered that it would not necessarily be true of literature. ...
<p align=justify>
[22] Purely practical and circumstantial difficulties of war, finance, patriotism and musical inefficiency having kept back the actual hearing of contemporary music, the wave of enthusiasm for this music that carried away the intellectual world shortly after the war was, though the intellectuals hardly realized it,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mainly retrospective
</mark>
in character. It could not be compared for example to the contemporary interest in Brancusi's sculpture or Edith Sitwell's poetry. It was a 'hangover' from a previous period, and the famous series of concerts given by Eugène Goossens in London in 1920 were historical in more ways than one. They apparently announced the dawn of a new era, but curiously enough their most potent arguments were drawn from the era which we all imagined to be closed.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[23] To put the problem in its most naïve form, a representative pre-war concert of modern works would have struck the man in the street...as definitely queer. He would have found great difficulty in relating it to his previous musical experiences and, giving up all attempt to follow it as form, would probably have relapsed into a purely passive state in which the strange colours and rhythms were allowed to make a direct appeal to his nerves.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p style="margin-right: 25%">
Criminy, I wish I could find a way for music to make this
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
direct appeal
</mark>,
</blockquote>
the way it did before I was admonished by its practical exigencies to learn to
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
follow it as form
</mark>.
</blockquote>
<br>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
His experiences would be unusual, but would assume a certain uniformity and logic through the very consistency of their strangeness.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
I mean,...cool.
<p>
(My note scrawled across this paragraph says, double-underlined: OPENNESS.)
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[23] Experiments may take
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
many forms
</mark>,
but only
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
one general direction
</mark>,
whereas the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
spirit of pastiche has no guiding impulse
</mark>.
Once invoked it becomes like the magic broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, to whom in-
<p align=justify>
[24]
<p align=justify>
deed the average modern composer, with his fluent technique, but lack of co-ordinative sense, may well be compared. It is the element of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deliberate pastiche
</mark>
in modern music that chiefly distinguishes it from the experimental period of before the war.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[26] Although in his abandonment of linear continuity and symmetrical design Debussy is linked to the impressionist painters, the famous 'harmonic revolution', for which he was supposed to be responsible, has more in common with the Symbolist movement in poetry.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The Symbolist poets did not invent new words, nor did Debussy—contrary to general belief—invent new chords.
</mark>
There are very few actual harmonic combinations in Debussy that cannot be found in Liszt; the novelty of Debussy's harmonic method consists in his using a chord
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
as such
</mark>, and not
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
as a unit
</mark>
in a form of emotional and musical argument.
<p align=justify>
...in Liszt they <i>[these chords]</i> form a definite point of stress in a continuous line of though, a point of stress that demands a resolution. For that reason we are apt to pass over their actual quality as pure sound. But Debussy takes a certain chord and, by leaving it unresolved, or by putting it under every note of a phrase (in a manner that dates back to Hucbald in the eleventh century), he draws our attention to this harmony as an entity in itself, with its own power of evocation. We do not take it in our stride
<p align=justify>
[27]
<p align=justify>
as we do any word in a sentence like 'the ultimate interests of the electors' or a figure in a photographic group, 'reading from left to right'. We examine it separately as we might an Egyptian hieroglyph or Chinese ideograph.
<p align=justify>
It is not my intention in a non-technical study such as this to trace back the origins of Debussy harmonic vocabulary to Mussorgsky, Liszt, Chabrier or Satie, to the exotic influences of the gipsy music he heard in Russia or of the Indo-Chinese music he heard at the Paris Colonial Exhibition. I merely wish to point out that Debussy's real revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords rather than the chords he uses. It is a development in harmony more far reaching than any of Liszt's or Wagner's devleopments of harmonic vocabulary.
<p align=justify>
By suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the methods of the literary Symbolists. There is nothing particularly Symbolist about a greenhouse attached to a vegetable garden with a gardener working near it; but when this greenhouse occurs, deserted and unexpected, in the middle of a forest...it immediately arouses a different and more instictive set of feelings, even though we might be hard put to it to analyze their precise nature.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...but their <i>general</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
nature
</mark>
can nonetheless be pronounced upon?
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing Debussy's work was not due so much as they thought to any strangeness in the sound. It was created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional reasoning in his music.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
No doubt
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
many people
</mark>
did have this problem this way. I guess a mastery of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
rhetorical and emotional reasoning
</mark>
vis-a-vis
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">the sound
</mark>
can cut both ways, eh?
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[30] It is legitimate to suppose that Debussy's technical experiments were a means—not an end. That is to say, it is more probable that the static style and harmonic mannerisms of <i>Pelléas</i> are due to his attempt to create a world of half-lights and dimly realized emotions, than that he chose this subject because he felt himself unable to achieve music in another style. At the same time we can see that by his treatment of harmony as an entity in itself Debussy prepares the way for the latter-day unmotivated experiments that have been described by a sympathetic critic as 'objective investigation of aural phenomena', while in his rejection of emotional rhetoric he unconsciously prepares the way for those who would reject emotion itself and throw out the baby with the bath water.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Does this so-called
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
objective investigation
</mark>
really
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
reject emotion itself
</mark>?
Or does it reject the conceit to communication/conveyance/prescription/imposition of one among many possible emotional responses in the listener?
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It need hardly be said that the coldness of much of Debussy's early music has nothing to do with the abstraction aimed at by certain present-day composers; it is a coldness of the natural world, not of the mechanical. This coldness is the most remarkable feature of the orchestral nocturnes, a transitional work halfway between the static and symbolist manner of <i>Pelléas</i> and the more fully developed impressionism of <i>La Mer</i>. These nocturnes, as Mr. Edwin Evans has rightly pointed out, recall Whistler rather than Chopin. They are like an exquisitely wrought Mohammedan decoration
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
in which no human form is allowed to appear
</mark>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Funny coincidence here that this particular reference would pop up, because by the time we got done fishing baby
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
emotion
</mark>
out of the sewer into which the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">objectiv</mark>ists
had emptied the preceding European century of its sentimental
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
rhetoric
</mark>,
then <i>quite immediately</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">human forms</mark> started
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">appear</mark>ing
and re-appearing in such concentration and frequency as to suggest that something more insidious than mere aestheticized
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
emotion
</mark>
was afoot.
<p>
I don't know about everyone else, but <i>I could really use a break</i>, and this recommends the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">Mohammedan</mark> line, actually, albeit for the most
un-Mohammedan of reasons.
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[32] from the purist's point of view it <i>[La Mer]</i> is the most finished and typical of Debussy's works—though, as I have pointed out, this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
lack of rhetorical emotion
</mark>
is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
by no means the same thing as abstraction
</mark>
. A picture does not become an abstract design because it has banished all purely literary interest. In its abandonment of formal principles, its lack of continuous melodic line, counterpoint, or development, in the accepted sense of the word, and in the pointillism of its scoring, <i>La Mer</i> represents the apex of Debussy's impressionist manner. Colour and atmosphere have taken the place of design and eloquence, and sounds succeed each other neither in definite continuity, nor in deliberate contrast, but with the arbitrary caprice of nature itself.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[45] There are two ways of destroying the significance of the House of Lords—you can either
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abolish it
</mark>
or you can
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
make everyone a member
</mark>. We have no sense of modulation in Debussy's music for the simple reason that he doesn't modulate, and we have no sense of modulation in Schönberg's music because the work itself has become one vast modulation.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[72] The various elements in painting being less easy to separate from each other than the various elements in music, it is obviously a little difficult to evoke deliberately more than one period at once, or to combine two periods of style, in any given painting. Picasso may change his style every five years, but during that five years each picture is strictly within its limited 'epoch'. Even in literature it is difficult to evoke more than one period in a given paragraph. James Joyce in the medical-student section of Ulysses gives us a brilliant pastiche of successive epochs in English literature, but it is a separate tour de force and does not represent the general texture of the book. As a pastiche it has a symbolic purpose and, moreover, the epochs succeed each other in logical and historical order. It can in no way be compared to the random and scrapbook methods of Diaghileff.
<p align=justify>
In music, though, the various elements, such as melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint, all taking place in practically the same moment of time can—though it is highly undesirable
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
!!
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
that they should—be so dissected and separated from each other, that a composer with no sense of style and no creative urge can
<p align=justify>
[73]
<p align=justify>
take medieval words, set them in the style of Bellini, add twentieth-century harmony, develop both in the sequential and formal manner of the eighteenth century, and finally score the whole thing for jazz band. Similarly, in ballet it is possible to have décor, choreography and music in different periods and taste, to throw abstract films on the back cloth while the orchestra turns out a laborious pastiche of Gluck and the dancers revive the glories of the nineteenth-century <i>Excelsior</i>.
<p align=justify>
It will be seen, then, that by his adoption or even invention of the particular type of present-day pastiche that can conveniently be described as time travelling Diaghileff immediately established a position of mastery again. It was not even necessary that his associates should be time travelers themselves—for by picking on collaborators sufficiently disparate in outlook he could achieve the required effect—but to start with, at least, he required a similar mentality on the part of his associates, and in Stravinsky, whose executive abilities so far outweighed his creative gifts, and who, like himself, was a somewhat déraciné figure, he found the ideal collaborator.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
I would probably have landed in this same foul mood had I belonged to Lambert's generation. But right now I actually think it is slightly negligent for a composer <i>not</i> to explore this particular kind of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
pastiche
</mark>;
that is, a pastiche of <i>musicians</i> rather of styles. Nominally they amount to the same thing, but procedurally they are not the same. To be sure, there is still, now, a point beyond which this becomes absurd and off-putting; but that conceptual point has been slowly receding as culture fragments and forms de-differentiate. i.e. I think there is a degree of pastiche which was formerly grating which has become tolerable simply by way of acclimation. And one way to get at it is simply to bring musicians together who normally would not be brought together. (That my occasional efforts to this end have not been very successful can be chalked up to my weak
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
executive abilities
</mark>
more so than to the limitations of the concept.)
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[83] Strauss, the most accomplished master of photographic suggestion in music, can, it is true, suggest a flock of sheep by a bleating on muted trombones, a couple of monks by a modal passage on two bassoons, and a boat of the water by the usual aqueous devices; but it is highly improbable that by a combination of the three he could bring before our eyes a picture of two monks in a barge with a lot of sheep.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
A perfectly apt illustration (pun intended) of the old problem. Let's not waste the opportunity by neglecting to overthink it just a bit:
<p>the point is <i>not</i>
<br>
that
<br>
representation is <i>impossible</i>,
<p>
rather that
<br>
it requires
<br>
<i>brute force</i> means;
<p>
and,
<br>
at that,
<br>
it can achieve only
<br>
<i>fragmentary</i> ends.
<p>
And
<br>
on the other side of the ledger:
<p>
the word
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
improbable
</mark>
was chosen carefully here,
<br>
or at least <i>it is</i> the correct word.
<p>
Taleb remarks, somewhere, that his coffee cup could explode if the wrong (or right) coincidence of atomic machinations were to occur, but that he's not too worried about it.
<p>
So,
<br>
if someone
<br>
<i>does claim</i>
<br>
to have "heard"
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
two monks in a barge with a lot of sheep
</mark>,
<br>
what is the recourse?
</p>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[86] It may seem that in concentrating so much attention on Diaghileff himself one is treating his collaborators in summary fashion. But Diaghileff was far more than a mere impressario. Though not, strictly speaking, a creative artist he had very much more genius than many of the artists who worked for him,... They were merely the gunmen executing the commands of their Capone, who, like all great gangsters, never touched firearms himself. ... His sensibility, if not always profound, was always rapid,... Being as near to a creative artist as any producer can be he was able to express things that were outside his own experience; but being a creative artist manqué, without a genuine urge or belief round which to orientate himself, he was always liable to become the tool of those whom he had brought into existence, and whose feelings he had formulated for them. He became a victim of the fashions he himself
<p align=justify>
[87]
<p align=justify>
had set, and being an older man than his entourage he was correspondingly more afraid of fashionable reaction. When he was young he could afford to attach his name to certain movements, but in later years he did not dare to face the accusation of conservatism that such an attachment would imply.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Most of this could just as well have been written about Disney.
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
[112]
<br>
<font size=5>
<center>
(f) Abstraction in Music
</center>
</font>
<p align=justify>
Nothing is more typical of the superficial nature of most modern or rather modernist criticism than its slipshod use of the word abstract, particularly as applied to music.
<p align=justify>
The word abstract has, of course, a certain definite significance when applied to painting, and it is a tenable hypothesis that the best modern paintings and sculptures have been abstract. Even so it would be reasonable to point out that, by denying himself realism,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Realism
</mark>
<br>
?!
<p>
Or "representation(alism)"
<br>
?
<p>
:^|
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
the painter, though he thus avoids the pitfalls of anecdotage at the
<p align=justify>
[113]
<p align=justify>
same time cuts himself off from the variety and significance of forms that intelligently used realism
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Realism??
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
can provoke. The modified realism of Cézanne can be of far greater interest from the purely formal point of view than the abstractions of Leger, but even though we may grant that the highest form of plastic art consists in a significant organization of shapes devoid of all purely representational
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
<i>Aha</i>!
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
sentiment and literary association, it by no means follows that this hasty and sweeping thesis holds good for music. It is all very well to hammer out a theory, however mistaken, that applies to an art functioning in space: it is quite another matter to apply this to an art that functions in time. Most of the modern fallacies about abstraction, literary sentiment, representationalism,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Uh huh...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<p align=justify>
<blockquote>
romantic contamination, etc. in music are due to ignoring this elementary distinction.
<p align=justify>
A picture with a narrative element in it is vaguely unpleasing not because it is literary, but because it is trying to represent time by cutting a section through it in space. ...rel[ying, e.g.] for its appeal not only on its own representational qualities and arrangement of forms, but on the associative and imaginative powers of the spectator, who is irresistably
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
<i>Vive la Resistance!</i>
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
led to reconstruct the events that have led up to this moment of time,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
That is, to "<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/06/scairquotes-viithe-challenge-and.html">unfry an egg</a>."
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
and to speculate sympathetically on the future.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Rare as sympathy is, it comes <i>far</i> more easily than clairvoyance.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
The interest of the spectator is forced away from the scene as it occurs in space to the event as it occurred in time. The picture is, therefore, in the nature of an uncompleted sentence. The artist has only suggested a line of thought and depends for his
<p align=justify>
[114]
<p align=justify>
final effect on an element of time that he cannot define in his own medium, that of space. The same incident, however, could obviously occur in a novel and be perfectly satisfactory, for then it would be one of a series of events in time and could balance the other events from this formal point of view, acquiring architectural value, as well as sentimental appeal.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Sure.
</p>
<p>
Just as long as we agree that <a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/11/bodies-and-artifacts-iv-aa-story-of.html">the métier</a> is Before rather than After The Fact; </p>
<p>that the métier almost always precedes the urge to portray
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The same incident</mark>;
</p>
<p>
and that the other way 'round is quite...
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
improbable
</mark>.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Conversely, a pair of boots painted by a master like Van Gogh is a perfectly finished artistic statement in space, whereas the most detailed literary description of a pair of boots would hardly have much artistic value except, perhaps, as a prelude to the treatment of boots in time, as it were, by attaching to them a series of events like those that befell Andersen's goloshes.
<p align=justify>
Neither of the two paintings mentioned above is exactly an ideal subject for musical inspiration. Not even Strauss...could produce the musical equivalent of Van Gogh's boots. At the same time, while the prospect of a Strauss symphonic poem based on Martineau's <i>chef-d'oeuvre</i> may seem too grisly to be envisaged, it is undeniable that he might achieve something by trying to express the underlying emotion of the scene, and by attempting to follow the sequence of implied events in terms of musical form. The impure picture, in fact, is nearer to music because of its emotional appeal, and its time element.
<p align=justify>
It is highly undesirable, of course, that the time element in musical design should be put to the purposes of sentimental narrative, but the mere fact that it can be so used distinguishes it from plastic design. The
<p align=justify>
[115]
<p align=justify>
repetitions of a certain underlying curve in an abstract or representational picture have no dramatic content because they occur in the same movement of time—one's eye can choose which it looks at first, or take in the various statements of the same form simultaneously. But the return of the first subject after the development in a symphonic movement has an inevitable touch of the dramatic, merely through the passage of time that has elapsed since its first statement.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Once again, render
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
drama
</mark>
in its 2020s tweenage-colloquial sense to understand the present reception one can expect for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the return of the first subject
</mark>.
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Time, in fact, is rather vulgarly dramatic;
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Yep, that is another way of putting it!
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
it is the sentamentalist of the dimensions,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
This guy is a nut, but he is a full-on <i>badass</i> writer.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
and small wonder that <i>visuels</i>, like Wyndham Lewis, feel that it is occupying too much space in our lives.
<p align=justify>
Quite apart from this expressive time element,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Hmm.
</p>
<p>Isn't
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sentiment
</mark>
<br>
<i>retrospective</i>,
</p>
<p>
while
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expression
</mark>
<br>
is
<br>
<i>prospective</i>
<br>
?
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
which grows in effect in direct proportion to the length of the work...there is a naturally expressive element in all types of music, whether primitive or sophisticated, that it would be unnecessary to insist on, or even mention, in any other age but our own. The type of modern composer and critic who would have us believe that the greatest music consists of an abstract succession of tastefully arranged notes is fond of contrasting the pure classicism of the eighteenth century with the decadent romanticism of the nineteenth century, enthroning the pure Mozart as here and casting the impure Wagner in the role of villain. Music—or so we are led to understand—was written in an objective spirit
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...which is not even close to the same thing as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abstraction
</mark>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
until the nine-
<p align=justify>
[116]
<p align=justify>
teenth century, when contamination from romantic sources set in,...
<p align=justify>
...<i>[this cohort has]</i> mistaken the cool restraint of the eighteenth-century masters for a deliberate frigidity and not troubled to look further back than this much-vaunted golden period of music. To borrow a phrase from Edmund Dulac, he is like a man who would write a history of the horse by giving us a list of famous Derby winners.
<p align=justify>
... Actually, the subjective spirit
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...which is <i>not</i> the same thing as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expression
</mark>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
in which Wagner sat down to write an opera is a far more common attitude in the history of music than the objective spirit in which Bach sat down to write a concerto.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
May God save us aesthetes from the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
more common attitude
</mark>
toward anything in particular.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Emotional and romantic expression in music is not a late and decadent excrescence, but a natural tradition, that only became temporarily eclipsed in a few minor eighteenth-century works.
<p align=justify>
Music, far from being an abstract art is as naturally emotional as painting is naturally representational.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Yep.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Emotional
</mark> certainly. But
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expressive
</mark>
?
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
If we speak of Mozart as a pure composer it is only in the
<p align=justify>
[117]
<p align=justify>
sense that we speak of Renoir as a pure painter. <i>Figaro</i> is pure compared to <i>Elektra</i>, just as <i>La Première Sortie</i> is pure compared to <i>When Did You Last See Your Father?</i> but that does not mean for a moment that Mozart or Renoir believed in abstraction in art.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
On point, sir.
</p>
<p>
But what the artist
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
believed
</mark>
<br>
about art
<br>
(theirs or anyone else's)
<br>
is
<br>
usually irrelevant
<br>
and
<br>
always elusive
<br>
.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Mozart's best music, as is well known, was found unpleasing by many of his contemporaries because of its intensely melancholy and romantic nature. Those present-day critics who see in Mozart nothing but a glorified craftsman making a concord of sweet sounds in a spirit of angelic detachment offer convincing proof of their complete insensitiveness to all save the purely stylistic aspects of music.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
I would hope that this point has finally become inarguable. Still, I find
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
detachment
</mark>
something of a strawman here. The question is whether, materially and/or phenomnelogically and/or any other <i>-(ic)-ally(-ical)</i> you want to offer up, creator and auditor can in any reasonable sense be said to be attached to (or detached from) <i>the same thing</i>?
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The romantic and emotional nature of music is latent in its origins. The earliest forms of music were, as far as can be ascertained from history and from the examination of still primitive races, unaccompanied folk songs and ritual drumming. A folk song, it stands to reason, is expressive and even programmatic. The best examples represent in embryo, as it were, the balance between emotional and formal content that has been struck by the greatest symphonists. As for primitive instrumental music, need one point out that the negro beating a tomtom is aiming not so much at an abstract dissection of rhythm in the manner of Stravinsky, as at the creation of an altogether unobjective state of physical excitement?
<!--
<h5>***the above is highlighted "LRJ""***</h5>
-->
</p>
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
There will be plenty more (i.e. too much) of this kind of thing to reckon with later on here. Speaking for myself, I can only confess that while I would rather listen to Stravinsky than to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the negro beating a tomtom
</mark>
, what I'm looking for in either case is precisely
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an altogether unobjective state of physical excitement
</mark>
, and so reducing things thusly certainly doesn't settle anything as far as I'm concerned.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Without in any way wishing to link the primitive origins of secular music with the primitive origins of religious music, one may recognize that in spite of its
<p align=justify>
[118]
<p align=justify>
deliberately restricted manner Gregorian chant still remains one of the most moving expressions of the musical spirit. As befits religious music, the emotion is to some extent
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impersonal
</mark>
, that is to say it embraces the individual in a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
communal feeling
</mark>
. But there is a world of difference between this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impersonal expression
</mark>
of a devotional spirit and a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cold objectivity
</mark>
. If it be pleaded that an unaccompanied vocal line, whether sacred or profane, hardly provides a parallel to the later complications of instrumental and choral music, one has only to look at the great period of choral writing to realize the folly of those who would hold up pure music as the classic norm.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
It's not the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
norm
</mark>
. The question is, <i>What does it do?</i>
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The religious music of the sixteenth century displays a great concentration on technical device, but this concentration is not objective, it is adapted to deeply expressive ends. The emotion may vary from the serenity of Palestrina to the passion of Vittoria...but it is an integral part of the music. To suggest that these masters were merely fabricating musical material in the spirit of Hindemith and later Stravinsky, would be pure impertinence.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[119] Objective pattern making is, roughly speaking, a product of the eighteenth century and it marks not an artistic progress, but a social and spiritual decline. Those who listened to a motet such as Vittoria's <i>O Vos Omnes</i> took part in it spiritually if not actually; those who listened to a madrigal such as <i>O Care thou wilt despatch me</i> as likely as not were all actually performing it—they each took a part and the part was worth taking. The same is true of the seventeenth-century consorts of viols whose decline is so lamented... With the advent of the professional violinist, and the decline of the amateur viol player, part writing gave way to fireworks and pattern making. Music ceased to be a vital
<p align=justify>
[120]
<p align=justify>
and spiritual experience
</p>
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Could this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
vital</mark>ity
ever have been <i>a fact</i> for more than a trifling minority of those who
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
took a part
</mark>
in music-making, no matter how much
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the part
</mark>
itself
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
was</mark>
(<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
objective</mark>ly!)
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
worth taking
</mark>?
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
and degenerated into a mere aural decoration—as which it is defined by that typical child of his time, Dr. Burney.
<p align=justify>
If you play music in your home, then you choose music of emotional content and technical interest; but if you are going to treat music as a background or ornament to social life in general, such qualities would be a positive disadvantage and all you require is something that is brilliant, easy and consonant. The eighteenth century produced a mass of occasional music with nothing to recommend it except a certain elegance of style. It is only this elegance combined with an absence of actual vulgarity that entitles it to any more serious consideration than the average present-day foxtrot. ...
<p align=justify>
Although the greatest achievements of the eighteenth century have probably never been surpassed, the general level of everyday music has probably never been lower. There is a certain distinction about the minor composers of earlier periods, but the minor eighteenth-century
<p align=justify>
[121]
<p align=justify>
composers are merely garrulous and perfunctory.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Sounds perfect for Rush Hour.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The same is true of the minor works of even such great masters as Mozart and Haydn. The trouble with modern enthusiasts for the purity of eighteenth-century music is their apparent inability to distinguish between romantic and subjective masterpieces, like Mozart's G Minor Quintet and G Minor Symphony, and the many divertimenti that he cynically turned out in order to pay for the rent and a little champagne.
<p align=justify>
The pièces d'occasion of this period are sufficiently lacking in intellectual and emotional content to justify the admiring epithets of abstract and objective applied by the present-day exponents of purity in music. But they also achieve the well-known combination of purity and dullness. In fact, it may safely be said that the only classical music that is abstract is bad classical music. The Romantic movement which is still held by a certain school of critics to have dethroned purely musical interests in favour of dramatic expression and literary association actually was a perfectly reasonable reaction back to the true tradition of music,
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Well, a <i>tendency</i> does not make a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
tradition
</mark>
. Tradition arises from (self-)conscious awareness of history, personal and collective alike. That's why the concept is more often applied to various
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
pur</mark>isms
than to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the true
</mark>
(meaning...the <i>normal</i>??)
practices of expression, of narrative, and of what Becker calls "the <i>causa-sui</i> project" of self-immortalization. Indeed, as Becker and Rank make clear, "traditions" per se just as well stand in the way of self-elevation (i.e. in their "collective aspect") as do they potentially serve as its very means.
<p>
To wit, the failure of the written score to fully capture sentimental and technical aspects alike extends in fact to the <i>causa-sui</i> issue, wherein one may apply Lambert's brand of skepticism: without modern individualism, modern communications, or indeed even modern standards of discrete authorship and rights in intellectual as well as material property, <i>what was in it for the</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
eighteenth-century
</mark>
<i>composer?</i> Becker suggests that the urge to self-immortalization and the conflict between individual and collective needs has been greatly heightened by modernity, but he also finds it, to some degree or other, endemic to the human condition.
<p>
It is easy to find contemporary evidence of a widely dispersed fight for psychic survival via increasingly desperate measures to reclaim and assert some (any) form of individuality or distinction. Perhaps it is <i>too</i> easy, actually, to locate such evidence given that we are all participant-observers. Still, the difference between, on one hand, a handwritten score whose authorship can still, centuries later, defy conclusive determination by renowned experts, and on the other, a computer file with hard-coded authorship and rights infomation, this difference should not be lost sight of. I doubt the latter cohort has lost sight of it, given that a seemingly minor administrative oversight now could easily result in all of this redundantly overwrought metadata becoming permanently unintelligible to new generations of machines. The provenance of so much otherwise "anonymous" work would then be lost. Living memory of the artists themselves would eventually die away. And then, suddenly, it would not be possible to tell just by examining the documents themselves that their creators in fact lived in a distinctively "modern" state of profound desperation, atomization, and insecurity rather than in the secure grip of a benevolent community to which they were useful. The community which, indeed, <i>more properly deserves "authorship" credit than do any of its individuals,</i> for once might actually receive more than its fair share.
<p>
This is highly speculative of course, but it's worth considering the possibility that at least in this narrow respect these eighteenth-century composers lived closer to the ideal than to the modern nightmare. One result is that the relative paucity of metadata, so to speak, gives to modern observers the strong <i>appearance</i> of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abstract</mark>ion;
whereas for Lambert (and he does make a good case), there are two booby traps set for us here: the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
intellectual and emotional content
</mark>
does not cease to exist simply because we do not find evidence of it in the critical discourse or in the minor works or (I am adding this one myself) notated in the score; and the very concept of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abstract</mark>ion
is a contemporary one, and therefore it is anachronistic to project it upon the distant past.
<p>
The question I would ask here (with Rank and Becker, perhaps, if I have understood them well enough) is <i>whether this wasting away of authorial metadata is not itself essential</i>; and in both senses of that word: <i>essential</i> as in "needed," and <i>essential</i> as in "unavoidable." Given the inevitable descent of competing <i>causa-sui</i> projects into destruction and violence, is this abililty of time to scrub the metadata from the artworks not in fact something on which we depend for long-term social stability? Is time perhaps
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the sentimentalist of the dimensions
</mark> only on the individual scale? And is it, conversely, ruthlessly Darwinistic (i.e. "the great equalizer") on the historical scale? Or, is it <i>supposed</i> to be that way, is it actually <i>better</i> for all of us in the long run if it <i>is</i> that way, but in the short run of things are we simply too terrified of our own finitude to just <i>let it be</i> that way?
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
a tradition of far greater force and a far greater duration than the elegant divagation provided by all but the finest eighteenth-century masters.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Well, <i>this</i> is just the <i>fallacy of imcomplete evidence</i>.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The reaction inevitably took an extreme turn with the result that perfunctory sentiment was apt to take the place of perfunctory pattern making. Classical technique became confounded with classical coldness, and the desire to achieve romantic atmosphere and warmth at all costs led to an unnecessary overthrowal of formal devices and to the creation of a false distinction
<p align=justify>
[122]
<p align=justify>
between classicism and romanticism that has lasted to this day.
<p align=justify>
We are still apt to regard formalism and emotional expression as opposed interests instead of as an inssoluble whole.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Well, for my part I regard the first as tractable and the second as intractable. That is all.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
That is why at the present time even sympathetic critics are sometimes puzzled by the combination of mathematical methods and melodramatic atmosphere to be found in so much atonal music. ... Berg's music itself would have sounded strange to seventeenth-century ears, but his aims were much the same as theirs. ... The atonal school, whatever its faults and in spite of its superficial air of mathematical frigidity, can in no way be described as abstract.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[133] We may well ask ourselves if, to obtain the static abstraction of Satie's best work, it is worth while throwing over the dynamic movement and expressiveness which has hitherto always been considered an essential part of music. ... A statement...is not necessarily valuable because it is complete [e.g. Satie has "achieved a more complete objectivity" than Stravinsky, whose "essential dynamic qualities keep breaking through" even in his most "abstract" work], and although Satie is of great interest
<p align=justify>
[134]
<p align=justify>
both as an individual figure and as a curious anticipation of the post-war <i>Zeitgeist</i> he can hardly be said to be a major composer. In spite of his intensely musical faculties it is impossible not to feel that the mentality that directed these instincts would have found truer expression in one of the plastic arts.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Suddenly Lambert's gambit becomes clear: the conceit to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abstraction
</mark> in music gets filed under the rubric of dedifferentiation. But rather than finding that painters have infringed upon music, he finds revisionist music critics projecting upon the eighteenth-century a distinctively twentieth-century concept of abstraction; and at that, <i>a concept which properly belongs to painting rather to music</i>.
<p>
This is a novel maneuver. It's easy to see (already) why this book caught McLuhan's attention despite its rather specialized and occasionally technical bearing on matters of marginal interest to the latter's overall project. But how does Lambert expect to get away with this having already quite forcefully (and correctly) dispensed with the possibility of true
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
representation
</mark>
in music aside from the very most
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
vulgar
</mark>
methods? He expects that the ostensible
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
emotional
</mark>
content of music, which arises from its temporal quality rather than from any
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
representational sentiment and literary association
</mark>,
is sufficient to shatter the conceit to pure abstraction.
<p>
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/bodies-and-artifacts-iipartchs.html">As previously</a>, I can't help but agree with the last part, or at least with its broad outlines. The quip that time
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
is the sentamentalist of the dimensions
</mark>
is brilliant writing and passable metaphysics, but it seems also in this context to presuppose a listener who can be counted upon to keep score of unfolding motivic development in a way which we know only trained musicians can (and not always happily, I hasten to add). For most other people, there is nothing to be sentimental about unless the recollection is made unavoidable by way of brute force repetition or exceptionally strong memory prompts. It seems Lambert could only agree that this is why
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sentimental</mark>ity as a temporal phenomenon attaches itself most readily to the smallest, smoothest granules of musical experience, i.e. to pop songs, which certainly have no monopoly on emotional appeal that would explain their outsized dominance in Market conditions. That said, it's also possible that for today's non-initiates there is no Mozart or Beethoven or Stravinsky but rather <i>The [My Location's] Orchestra</i> (more likely <i>The [My Clique's] Streaming Service, Tuned To An Orchestra Playlist</i>).
<p>
Actually, forced to choose, this the kind of paradoxical dual victory for both sentiment and abstraction that I would rather see, as against the crude flattening of distinction between Berg and the seventeeth century, which I'd rather not see at all, even if it can be made to sound very reasonable.
<p>
As for Satie as a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
plastic art</mark>ist
<i>manqué</i>, when an artist verbally states their aesthetic objectives and everything about the statement makes more sense in some other métier and little-to-no sense in the métier at hand, then this sort of quip becomes fair game. But otherwise I think not.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This warping of the medium to use it for a form of expression best suited to another art is by no means confined to composers, amongst modern artists. While Satie and Stravinsky may be said in their objective compositions to be taking up the work of the painter, the surrealist painters are working on lines which would obviously find more convincing and fluid expression in writing, while transitional writers like Gertrude Stein are aiming at rhythmic patterns and formal arrangements of sound that would have far more weight if expressed in musical form.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Ditto.
<p>
Given the overall conservatism evinced throughout this book, starting even with the title, it's hard to imagine that Lambert really believes this, or would believe it given the chance. I guess it depends on what exactly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
weight</mark>
means.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
By working out of focus with one's medium one can undoubtedly achieve results of the utmost experimental interest; but it is rarely that these experiments have led to anything but a technical and spiritual cul-de-sac.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Yep, that is the nature of true
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
experiments
</mark>.
We need experiments! Experiments are not the problem. The problem, rather, is that "true" experiments are not half as numerous as the Uptown bloat of "experimental" composers would suggest; also that most experiments need not be conducted on an audience; yet it is precisely this latter desire (Becker's <i>causa-sui</i> rides again, perhaps) and not any kind of disinterested exploration which motivates the vast majority of "experimental" music. (Yep, this was precisely the response of one of these younguns when I raised the audience question in a class at CalArts: the presence/involvement of the audience <i>is</i> an indispensible part of the experiment, period. Next question. So, the next time you're trapped watching a musical "experiment" unfold whose outcome was completely predictable from the outset, blame yourself. <i>You</i> and your willingness to show up are the reason it needs to be unspooled anyway.)
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[136] One cannot erase the results of nationalism any more than one can erase the results of Romanticism. What the eighteenth century achieved with ease and by traditional means we must achieve with difficulty and in our own individual way. When we look at Sibelius' <i>Finlandia</i>, and then at his Seventh Symphony, we may well agree with George Moore that art must be parochial in the beginning to become cosmopolitan in the end.
<p align=justify>
Internationalism, like simplicity, is a desirable end but, like simplicity,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is found only in the highest and the lowest forms of art
</mark>.
The paintings of Giotto speak an international language and so do lavatory drawings. We must beware lest in aiming at one we produce the other. It is fatally easy for the modern composer, reacting against the pssionate nationalism of recent musical movements, to rid himself of parochialism not by intensifying his thought but by denuding it, and to reach universality through nullity.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[164] It is important to emphasize once more the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
spiritual conflict
</mark>
that lies at the back of the obvious
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
technical conflict
</mark>
between the folk song and classical form.
<p align=justify>
To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder
</mark>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
My note says:
<br>
It's actually a problem even in commercial music...it arises on MANY gigs!
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[178] There is no possibility of a modern <i>Tristan</i>..., because this particular type of romantic feeling has crumbled away just as much as the national feeling of Mussorgsky's time.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
There was nothing forced about Wagner and Liszt's romanticism
</mark>.
It was the most natural thing in the world for Liszt to take his young countesses on Lake Como and read them Tasso and Victor Hugo. If anyone still thinks this spirit exists let
<p align=justify>
[179]
<p align=justify>
him visualize himself taking his young woman on the Serpentine and reading her T.S. Eliot. I don't want him to dismiss the argument as facetious or trivial, I just want him to spend a minute or two visualizing the scene. The various inhibitions, social and personal, which would prevent this scene taking place, or being in any way moving did it improbably take place, exactly explain why the modern composer cannot hope to write a movement like the Gretchen section in the <i>Faust</i> symphony.
<p align=justify>
If we go back further in history for a great opera that owes much of its greatness to its firm spiritual and social background, we find that Mozart's operas are not a symbolic but an exact reproduction of the spirit and society of his day. He himself could have walked into one of his own operas,... The essential falsity of modern attempts to revive the delicious formality of the Mozartian period of opera lies in the fact that the whole framework of society, whose relation to the individual symbolizes the cadences and codas that gently restrain the flow of Mozart's passionate line, is crumbling away if not already completely dessicated.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
Yep. But these
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
modern attempts to revive
</mark>
are a parochial issue. On the reception side, the fact that anyone still listens to these operas at all, by whatever pathway, is made more vexing rather than less by the question of social context. It would seem that this participation is not a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
reviv</mark>al
but rather a finding of something new (or perhaps it would be better and more simply put: finding <i>something else</i>). And even so, the <i>desire</i> to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
revive
</mark>
<i>can</i> in fact be widely observed here and elsewhere, which, again, raises more questions than it answers. Why would we ourselves want, actually, to walk right into <i>someone else's opera</i>?
<p>
The only explanation is that even the most "dated" of artworks can, potentially, hit upon something that has legs.
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
If we take <i>Figaro</i>, <i>Tristan</i>, and <i>Boris</i>, as representing three of the highest peaks in the history of music, we see that they symbolize three phases of human thought without which background they would have taken on a very different shape and quality. ...
<p align=justify>
[180]
<p align=justify>
... Mozart represents the aristocratic internationalism of the eighteenth century, Wagner the passionate individualism of the romantic movement, Mussorgsky the equally passionate democratic nationalism of the nineteenth century...
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The people who, in effect, say to the modern composer 'Why don't you stop making those beastly noises and write lovely tunes and pleasant harmonies like those in <i>Figaro</i>, <i>Tristan</i> and <i>Boris</i>, etc.', may not realize that even were a modern composers sufficiently endowed with invention and technique he is totally lacking in the artistic faith, conscious or unconscious, that these phases of thought provided
</mark>.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
My note says:<br>
The question is, though...WHY+HOW TF are so many LISTENERS NOT "lacking in the artistic faith" of a time they never lived in?? This suggests a mere lag, to be sure, but also something like the aestheticism and transcendentalism that Tomlinson, e.g., decried.
</p>
<!--
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[181] Although most people would admit that the aristocratic internationalism of Mozart's time and the romantic individualism of Wagner's were both, if not extinct, completely enfeebled in our own day, it might be thought that the nationalism that inspired <i>Boris</i> is more rampant now than ever. At first sight this may seem to be so but, just as there is more food than ever in the world and also more starvation, just as there is more music than ever in the world and also less genuine musical experience, so at the present there is more petty nationalism than ever combined with a less genuine
<br>
<br>
[182]
<br>
<br>
<b><u>...whoops, need the rest of this!!...</u></b>
</blockquote>
-->
<p>
...
</p>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[188] We can say without falsity that we prefer the design of a Utamaro print to that of a Puvis de Chavannes panel, or that we admire Maya carvings more than those of Mr. Moore; but we cannot say that we think that classical Indian music shows a more highly developed sense of form than classical Italian music, because the whole basis of thought and principle of construction is so entirely different. Nor can we compare the orchestration of Chinese theater music with the orchestration of European theater music, for there is hardly an instrument common to the two. Any attempt of a Western composer to approximate to oriental instrumentation by the use of exotic drums, bass flutes, etc., is monstrously crude when compared to the genuine article, partly because it is impossible to rival the virtuosity of the oriental performer, and partly because the melodic instruments cannot execute the minute and subtle divisions of the scale found in non-European music.
<p align=justify>
More important, however, than these technical considerations is the fact that while we can appreciate oriental plastic art without altering our angle of approach, or adopting a different criterion, we cannot appreciate oriental music without a violent dislocation of our usual critical processes, if indeed we can appreciate at all an art that lives in so different an emotional world and depends to so great a degree on improvisation. Exoticism in music is therefore more artificial than exoticism in literature or the plastic arts, and for this
<p align=justify>
[189]
<p align=justify>
reason it might be expected to produce even fewer works of ultimate importance and architectural value than self-conscious nationalism. But actually its artificiality is in its favour, for it induces in the composer a certain degree of stylization that is often to be preferred to the verism of the nationalist composer. Moreover, the imitation of the arabesques of oriental melody—though appalling at its worst—can, in the works of a composer of sensibility...produce themes of a far greater plasticity than the rigid folk songs which the nationalists plump down in the middle of a symphony.
<p align=justify>
Sorabji, himself an authority on oriental music, has spoken of the Asiatic affinities shown in the suppleness of rhythm, the richness and delicacy of colouring, and the flexibility of melodic line in Debussy's best works. A tune of an exotic type, unless it is to be accompanied merely by a Maskelyne and Devant tom-tomming, compels an equally unconventional and supple formal treatment, and thus exoticism, though even more disruptive of the eigtheenth-century spiritual tradition than is nationalism, has produced a greater variety of valuable architectural experiment.
</blockquote>
</font>
<p>
My note says:<br>
Dizzying perhaps to try separating out the racialism from the plain-facts here...but perhaps the general thrust is worth taking seriously; or, perhaps it merely boils down to a determinism which can be problematized as such. Anyway, this "exoticism" is unfortunately still with us, and occasionally hijacks Multiculturalism like a parasite.
</p>
<br><br>
<font face=arial>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[197] There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this
<p align=justify>
[198]
<p align=justify>
limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of <i>La Valse</i> and towards the beginning of <i>Bolero</i>).
</blockquote>
</font>
<!--
<p>
My note says:
<br>
LMAO
</p>
-->
<br><br>
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-67389516241297604122024-03-12T22:29:00.000-07:002024-03-12T22:29:03.939-07:00Rudi Supek—Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism<br>
<p>
Rudi Supek<br>
"<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/supek/1965/cultural-criticism.htm
">Freedom and Polydeterminism
<br>
in Cultural Criticism</a>" (1965)<br>
in<br>
<i>Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium</i><br>
ed. Erich Fromm<br>
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, pp. 280-298.<br>
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p>
Culture
<br>
is very likely
<p style="margin-left: 1%">
one of the most
<br>
sensitive
<br>
areas of
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
social criticism.
<p style="margin-left: 6%">
Nowhere else
<br>
can
<p style="margin-left: 10%">
the inadequacy or absurdity of theoretical presuppositions or methodological procedures
<br>
be
<br>
uncovered so rapidly,
<p style="margin-left: 15%">
nowhere else
<br>
can
<p style="margin-left: 21%">
human creative activity
<br>
overwhelm
<br>
erroneous premises and conclusions with such promptitude,
<p style="margin-left: 28%">
and
<p style="margin-left: 36%">
nowhere else
<br>
can
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
such harm be
<br>
inflicted
<br>
upon the creative potentialities of human beings
<p style="margin-left: 55%">
as when
<p style="margin-left: 66%">
a dogmatic theory
<br>
is
<br>
imposed on cultural policy
<p style="margin-left: 78%">
by means of
<br>
social compulsion.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 83%">
... The creative nature of man,
<p style="margin-left: 80%">
the mode of human participation in social life,
<p style="margin-left: 76%">
the relationship between the collective <i>élan</i> and individual creative potentialities,
<p style="margin-left: 71%">
the establishment of certain social limitations on creativity,
<p style="margin-left: 65%">
and individual ability to overcome personal and social limitations in the service of one and the same ideal,
<p style="margin-left: 59%">
are all
<br>
most prominent
<br>
in
<br>
the field of culture.
<p style="margin-left: 52%">
It is precisely in the realm of culture
<br>
in our times
<p style="margin-left: 44%">
that the contradiction
<br>
between
<br>
society and the individual,
<p style="margin-left: 33%">
between
<br>
the collective consciousness and the individual consciousness,
<p style="margin-left: 21%">
and between
<br>
the concrete totality represented by society
<br>
and
<br>
the ideal totality represented by the individual,
<p style="margin-left: 8%">
begins to sharpen in the most obvious way.
</blockquote>
<br>
<hr>
<p style="background: beige">
Well,
<br>
Rank would not accept
<br>
that this is a product only of
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">our</mark> or anyone else's <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">times</mark>.<br>
Rather, it belongs to all times.
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 51%">
We have just encountered,
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 44%">
in <i>the concept of totality</i>,
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 37%">
the first category that is a source of
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 22%">
certain ambiguities and one-sided interpretations
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 39%">
in social criticism.
</p>
<p>
This category is interpreted in the social sciences generally,
<p style="margin-left: 47%">
and in sociology in particular,
<p style="margin-left: 12%">
in terms of the concept of society as such,
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
either
<p>
in the spirit of
<p>
<center>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
<i>
ontological realism
</i>
</mark>
</center>
<p>
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
or
<br>
<br>
<p>
in the spirit of
<p>
<center>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
<i>
ontological nominalism
</i>
</mark>
</center>
.
<br>
<br>
<p>
Society in the former sense is
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 27%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">some sort of<br>
higher,<br>
organic,<br>
and closed<br>
entity to which the<br>
individual<br>
is<br>
subordinated<br>
in every respect</mark><br>
;
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 20%">
society in the latter sense is
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 46%">
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">no more than<br>
a chance accumulation,<br>
an aggregation of interests,<br>
or the locale<br>
in which<br>
individual wills and interests<br>
are<br>
operative<br>
(or join together,<br>
or compete,<br>
or struggle)</mark><br>
.
</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>
<center>
Both concepts
</center>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
have deeply permeated
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 14%">
the thought, philosophy, and sociology
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 21%">
of bourgeois society.
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 80%">
While
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 46%">
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">classic liberalism</mark><br>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">(Smith, Hobbes, Bentham)</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 32%">
held to
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 46%">
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">nominalism</mark>,
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 27%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">romantic philosophy</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 52%">
interpreted society
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 63%">
and the people
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 74%">
in the light of
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 85%">
ontological realism.
</p>
<p>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">The latter conception</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 33%">
thus carried over
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 66%">
from
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 79%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">Hegel and Schelling</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 89%">
to<br>
the
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 79%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">theoreticians of the “folk soul”</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 59%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">(Lazarus and Steinthal)</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 53%">
and
<p style="margin-left: 39%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">organic positivism</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 19%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">(Comte, Spencer, Durkheim)</mark>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 9%">
and thence<br>
to
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
the most recent
<p style="margin-left: 6%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
totalitarian doctrines</mark> of the
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
fascist<br>
and
<p style="margin-left: 4%">
Stalinist
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
varieties.
</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<p style="background: beige">
So,<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">total</mark> conceptions of society are mirrored in <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">total</mark>itarian domination.<br>
This is counterintuitive amidst the Red State-Blue State crossfire,<br>
wherein the notion of society as something
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 2.5%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
to which the individual is subordinated in every respect
</mark>
</p>
<p style="background: beige">
is openly and virtuously claimed by many who fancy themselves<br>
(sometimes quite self-consciously)<br>
antifascist.
<br>
<br>
Seems to me, though,<br>
that the total-ness of conception<br>
is less at fault than is<br>
the sheer scale<br>
at which we are now forced to contemplate such matters.<br>
The "realist" conception<br>
has very different implications<br>
in a neolithic "community"<br>
than in a post-industrial "society."
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 23%">
on this occasion
<br>
we will treat only certain theories in the realm of culture,
<p style="margin-left: 55%">
and in particular the Marxist application
<br>
of the category of totality
<br>
to
<br>
the interpretation of culture and cultural policy.
<p style="margin-left: 35%">
In this field,
<br>
we must face up to
<br>
<i>three well known conceptions in the spirit of ontological realism</i>,
<br>
which involve
<br>
the complete subordination of the creative individual to the social totality.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
The first conception in this series falls within the range of
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue"><i>theory of reflection</i></mark>.
<p style="margin-left: 12%">
By analogy with the reflection of “objective reality” in the subject,
<br>
this theory assumes that the cultural superstructure
<br>
is only a reflection of
<br>
the material foundation of society,
<p style="margin-left: 42%">
with the entire “social reality” being considered
<br>
as
<br>
something more real and more primary in terms of value
<p style="margin-left: 29%">
and with cultural creation being regarded
<br>
as
<br>
nothing but a more or less adapted reflection of reality proper.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This theory falls back on the Platonist idealization of “objective reality”
<br>
and affirms the inferiority of culture and the art that can only reflect
<br>
(not to say imitate)
<br>
this reality.
<p style="margin-left: 65%">
Art necessarily lags behind reality.
<p style="margin-left: 38%">
The best compliment that art can possibly receive
<br>
is that it has succeeded in conveying an impression of social reality
<br>
“as faithfully as possible”
<br>
or
<br>
“as characteristically as possible.”
<p style="margin-left: 60%">
Cultural creation,
<br>
along with the whole realm of esthetics,
<br>
thus becomes in ontological terms
<br>
just an epiphenomenon of material reality.
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p style="background: beige">
<i>The thing is</i><br>
with all this business about<br>
the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">inferiority of culture</mark> and its alleged <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">lag</mark>ging <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">behind reality</mark>,<br>
<i>even then</i><br>
I've never been quite sure<br>
<i>why tf</i><br>
the imperative to <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">reflect</mark><br>
and to <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">convey an impression</mark><br>
follows <i>necessarily</i> or even <i>directly</i> from all of this.<br>
If art is so <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">inferior</mark> for such purposes,<br>
then why apply it in this way at all?
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 8%">
Within the bounds of historical dynamics,
<br>
the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">material social foundation</mark>
<br>
becomes something not only <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">objective</mark>
<br>
but also <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">causative</mark>,
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
the <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">cultural superstructure</mark>
<br>
being something <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">subjective</mark>
<br>
and <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">consequential</mark>.
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
Since the social and political correlative of the material foundation is in the ruling class,
<br>
culture is always the spiritual expression of a single class.
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
When the foundation changes, the superstructure also changes.
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
When the foundation disappears, the superstructure likewise disappears.
<p style="margin-left: 8%">
Culture thus retains the characteristic features of an epiphenomenon,
<br>
even when the inverse effect of the superstructure on the foundation is mentioned
<br>
out of respect for the dialectic.
<p style="margin-left: 1%">
It is important in a methodological sense at this point to keep in mind that
<br>
the foundation and the superstructure are the <i>correlatives of the same historical entity</i>.
<br>
The cultural superstructure in this view,
<br>
thus remains closed within the bounds of a given foundation
<br>
and incapable of transcending this foundation in any way,
<p style="margin-left: 13%">
i.e., incapable of shifting to another historical epoch in terms of value.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 39%">
Such a grasp of the whole, or totality,
<br>
of a given historical situation
<br>
leads to certain consequences in the theory of culture.
<p style="margin-left: 50%">
First,
<br>
the search is on for the class correlatives
<br>
or “social equivalents”
<br>
of particular cultural themes and artistic styles.
<p style="margin-left: 35%">
Second,
<br>
attempts are made
<br>
to explain
<br>
changes in cultural creation
<br>
exclusively
<br>
in the light of
<br>
changes in the social foundation.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<p style="background: beige">
This <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">second</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">consequence</mark>
<br>
of the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green"><i>theory of reflection</i></mark>
<br>
is particularly rejected by Rank
<br>
as
<br>
failing to account for psychological factors;
<br>
and this <i>not</i>
<br>
because psychologies necessarily diverge into an intractible diversity
<br>
but
<br>
in fact because
<br>
there is an all-but-universal psychological conflict
<br>
which theories of reflection
<br>
simply fail to take any notice of;
<br>
this being,
<br>
for Rank,<br>
the tension between individual and collective concerns.
</p>
<p style="background: beige">
This is not quite the same thing as merely invoking "individual" diversity or autonomy to push back against <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">attempts</mark> to <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">explain</mark> <mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">changes</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">in cultural creation</mark> <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">exclusively</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">in the light of</mark> <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">changes</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">in the social foundation</mark>. It is, in fact, to hold that at least one significant element of <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">the social foundation</mark> <i>doesn't change</i>. And that is not something that self-styled psycho-voyeurs with eager ears to the <mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">social</mark> ground are likely to accept.
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<p>
The theory of the
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue"><i>progressive and decadent development</i></mark>
<br>
of society
<br>
as an historical entity
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 60%">
is our second example of
<br>
the erroneous application of the category of totality.
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 20%">
This theory is really just a subvariety of the first,
<br>
which introduces the ideas
<br>
of
<br>
the progressive and decadent development of particular phases
<br>
into
<br>
the relationship between the foundation and the superstructure.
</p>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 30%">
By applying the foundation superstructure scheme
<center>
o<br>
n<br>
e<br>
s<br>
i<br>
d<br>
e<br>
d<br>
l<br>
y<br>
</center>
<p style="margin-left: 40%">
to the realm of culture,
<br>
this theory projects
<br>
the political and social decadency of a society
<br>
onto
<br>
cultural creativity.
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
To be sure, this theory soon encounters
<br>
certain <font size=1>small</font> difficulties.
<br>
It cannot explain
<br>
why
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">the most valuable</mark>
<br>
cultural achievements
<br>
have
<br>
so often been produced
<br>
in
<br>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">such decadent epochs</mark>
<br>
as
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
the Athenian era after Pericles,
<br>
the Roman era after Caesar,
<br>
and the Middle Ages after Dante,
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 27%">
not to mention the decadence that is supposed to have set in
<br>
with
<br>
the appearance of impressionism in bourgeois society.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<p style="background: beige">
Well, sure.<br>
But<br>
you can always just <i>deny</i> the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">valu</mark>e.<br>
It seems that this denial merely had to become <i>imaginable</i><br>
(if not quite <i>plausible</i>)<br>
in order to<br>
pretty much<br>
take<br>
over.
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
This theory has also created
<br>
another difficulty
<br>
by introducing a purely gnosiological criterion
<br>
alongside
<br>
the historical criterion of progress and decadence.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<p style="background: tan">
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosiology">"Gnosiology" on Wikipedia</a>:
<br>
<i>"the philosophy of knowledge and cognition".
<br>
In Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy,
<br>
the word is often used as a synonym for epistemology.
<br>
...
<br>
In philosophy,
<br>
gnosology
<br>
(also known as gnoseology or gnostology)
<br>
literally
<br>
means the study of gnosis,
<br>
meaning knowledge
<br>
or
<br>
esoteric knowledge.</i>
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
Under the theory of reflection,
<br>
the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">progressive</mark> is that which is more <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">objective or realistic</mark>
<br>
and
<br>
the <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">decadent</mark> that which provides a more subjective reflection,
<br>
i.e., a reflection which is <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">subjectivistic or expressionistic</mark>.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
The gnosiological criterion being lasting and unalterable,
<br>
realism must necessarily be progressive
<br>
and
<br>
impressionism or expressionism decadent or even reactionary,
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 20%">
the latter art forms being
<br>
expressions
<br>
of
<br>
a subjectivistic attitude toward reality.
<p style="margin-left: 35%">
From Lukács to Timofeev,
<br>
the theoreticians of socialist realism
<br>
have
<br>
confused
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">historical dynamics</mark>
<br>
with
<br>
the postulates of <mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">cognitional theory</mark>
<br>
that
<br>
are otherwise applicable
<br>
only to scientific cognition.
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 15%">
It is a genuine riddle to them
<br>
why
<br>
the revolutionary bourgeoisie expressed itself
<p style="margin-left: 65%">
at one time
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 15%">
in a pronouncedly subjectivistic art
<br>
and
<br>
the revolutionary proletariat
<br>
during the time of the October Revolution
<br>
likewise
<br>
made use of a subjectivistic art
<br>
in
<br>
the expressionism
<br>
of
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
Mayakovsky,
<br>
Piscator,
<br>
Meyerhold,
<br>
and
<br>
so many others.
<p style="margin-left: 13%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">The “cultural superstructure” obviously fails completely
<br>
to respect certain of the fundamental principles
<br>
of the theory of reflection</mark>.
<p style="margin-left: 30%">
How else are we to explain
<br>
the fact
<br>
that
<p style="margin-right: 45%">
the bourgeoisie expressed itself
<br>
in
<br>
a romantic and subjectivistic manner
<br>
during its progressive phase,
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
with realism making an appearance
<br>
only
<br>
by the time of the first serious social crisis after 1848
<br>
as
<br>
a symptom of crisis
<br>
and thereby
<br>
of the beginning of decline?
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
This seems to me the right tactic in one respect:
<br>
collect and catalog counterexamples such as these until the master theory starts to look implausible.
<br><br>
The pitfall,
<br>
though,
<br>
is that now we are playing the enemy's game;
<br>
we have been dragged down to the idiot's level,
<br>
as it were,
<br>
whereby (s)he may now beat us with experience.
<br><br>
<p style="background: beige">
Ultimately
<br>
it is neither the scientific worldview
<br>
nor the desire for economic justice
<br>
nor the Materialist view of the world
<br>
which must be abandoned.
<br>
What must be abandoned,
<br>
rather,
<br>
is something seemingly more trivial but in reality equally fearsome:
<br>
<b>the conceit to "expression."</b>
<br><br>
The accusation of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a subjectivistic attitude toward reality
</mark>
<br>
and the parsing of this attitude as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">decadent or even reactionary
</mark>
<br>
cannot sustain itself without accompanying theories of
<br>
transmission,
<br>
correspondence,
<br>
interpretation,
<br>
and the like.
<br><br>
It is precisely <b>the conceit to "expression"</b>
<br>
which asserts that the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
subjectivistic
</mark>
artist has said something about reality,
<br>
though they may in fact
<br>
have
<br>
said nothing,
<br>
said something that is less obvious,
<br>
said something false with full knowledge of its falsity and with some second-order effect in mind to that end,
<br>
etc.,
<br>
etc.,
<br>
etc.,
<br><br>
<p style="background: beige">
Rank is again apt here:
<blockquote>
<i>
Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.
</i>
<br>
(<i>AnA</i>, pp. 11-12)
<br><br><br>
<i>
In one point modern research is more or less unanimous: that the most vital elements in our culture—the making of fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement of time, observation of the stars—originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs.</i>
<br>
(p. 235)
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
It is not only
<br>
scholars, critics, and artists ourselves
<br>
who abuse the conceit to "expression"
<br>
,
<br>
but also
<br>
Puritans,
<br>
holier-than-thous,
<br>
and
<br>
of course
<br>
all those faux-"realists" who have
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
confused historical dynamics
<br>
with
<br>
the postulates of cognitional theory that are otherwise applicable
<br>
only
<br>
to
<br>
scientific cognition
</mark>
<br>
.
<br><br>
<b>
Once you claim to be "expressing" something other than what appears to be there, the door is open for you to be accused of "expressing" something you never thought and didn't even know existed.
</b>
<br><br>
Realism, freedom, community...all these things are great, but what is really, <i>desperately</i> needed from all concerned is <i>honesty</i>. That is our greatest deficit as measured against our needs. It is for lack of <i>honesty</i> among its exponents that the scientific worldview comes to look so oppressive, or perhaps actually becomes oppressive in concrete ways. A little honesty would upend <i>everything</i>, uncomfortably at first to be sure, but ultimately for the best.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<br><br>
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
If we
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
assume
</mark>
that decadence set in immediately after the era of realism in painting and literature,
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
i.e., with the appearance of impressionism and naturalism,
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
then the only
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
conclusion
</mark>
to be drawn
<br>
is that
<br>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
every further cultural creation
</mark>
<br>
so long as this decadence lasts
<br>
(<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
a whole century thus far!</mark>)
<br>
will amount to
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
<br>
one step further into decadency
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 5%' margin-right: 10%">
Expressionism will be more decadent than impressionism,
<br>
surrealism more decadent than expressionism,
<br>
and nonobjective or abstract art the extreme mode of decadence.
<p style="margin-left: 22%">
The longer the decadence lasts,
<br>
the more profound will be the decline in values,
<br>
and
<br>
the greater the dehumanization.
<p style="margin-left: 9%; margin-right: 21%">
For these reasons, the more recent cultural achievements of bourgeois society will always be less acceptable than the older achievements, which are then transformed into “the classics.”
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
In this way,
<br>
so far as the cultural inheritance is concerned,
<br>
the theory leads to
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
traditionalism
</mark>
and
<br>
to the sole acceptance of
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
old and outmoded cultural values
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 35%; margin-right: 8%">
Such an orientation
<br>
in relation to the cultural inheritance in a socialist society
<br>
must necessarily “go always against the stream and against the era”
<br>
and make fresh forces old before their time.
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Again,
<br>
we are somewhat trapped within the terms of
<br>
the <i>Expressionist Fallacy</i>
<br>
if
<br>
we make this squandering of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
fresh forces
</mark>
<br>
and the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">outmod</mark>ing
of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cultural values
</mark>
<br>
central to our case.
<br><br>
But
<br>
even I wouldn't deny that there are artworks,
<br>
particularly "popular" artworks,
<br>
where something
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
fresh
</mark>
is unleashed
<br>
(though I <i>would</i> deny that
<br>
this has <i>anything</i> to do with
<br>
"expression"!).
</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 50%">
We have already pointed out that this theory leads to
<br>
a variety of difficulties in the interpretation of cultural dynamics
<br>
and often to absurd conclusions. And
<p style="margin-left: 45%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
the adherents to this theory themselves
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
frequently contradict
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
each other
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 40%">
Lukács thus considers
<br>
that bourgeois art
<br>
was progressive
<br>
only during its earliest phase,
<br>
e.g., in the Flemish landscapes,
<br>
and then fell into decadence with the onset of romanticism
<br>
(even though the latter amounted to
<br>
a “French revolution in poetic form”!)
<p style="margin-left: 35%">
On the other hand, the idea is much more common
<br>
(shared alike by Plekhanov, Hausenstein, and Hamann)
<br>
that decadence set in with the appearance of impressionism,
<br>
through which “the petty bourgeoisie attained its culminating position.”
<p style="margin-left: 30%">
Plekhanov nevertheless noted
<br>
the joyous aspect of this art
<br>
and considered it to belong
<br>
to the society of the future
<br>
by virtue of its
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
hedonist unconcern
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
On this basis, the Soviet theoretician Matsa has been impelled to doubt that impressionism is decadent art and to ascribe the beginning of decadence to expressionism, which “deforms the external world.”
<p style="margin-left: 20%">
As we have already seen,
<br>
the question then arises
<br>
as to how the October Revolution
<br>
could have been echoed in expressionism.
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
The answer is simple.
<p style="margin-left: 32%">
The shout,
<br>
the cry,
<br>
the slogan,
<br>
and the directive
<br>
are always going to be compact in the expressionistic mode like action itself,
<br>
for narration is unfeasible in the course of the action.
<p style="margin-left: 10%">
Yet such an
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
uncomplicated
</mark>
psychological explanation
<br>
is
<br>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
not accepted
</mark>
by the adherents to socialist realism.
<p style="margin-left: 42%">
To be sure,
<br>
there have been
<br>
some recent attempts
<br>
to
<br>
consider nonobjective art alone
<br>
as genuinely decadent art.
<p style="margin-left: 47%">
This opinion has been expressed by the Soviet critic
<br>
Lifshits
<br>
on only one occasion
<br>
but seems to be acquiring a multitude of adherents,
<br>
although it has not yet become “official.”
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p>
The
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
<i>theory of reification</i>
</mark>
is our third example of the erroneous application of the category of totality in the field of culture.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Much more subtle than the others, this theory has attracted large numbers of contemporary Marxists, for it undeniably contains a fragment of the truth. The weak side of this theory is its historical relativism, conditional upon the enclosure of the cultural historical situation within the bounds of a specific totality.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
Like the other theories,
<br>
the theory of reification
<br>
lays stress on the foundation,
<br>
i.e., on the economic relationships
<br>
or modes of production in capitalist society.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
...
<p style="margin-left: 12%">
The process of reification
<br>
thus consists essentially
<br>
of the transformation of
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
qualitative relations
</mark>
<br>
into
<br>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
quantitative magnitudes
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 17%">
The roots of reification naturally lie in a whole conglomeration of secondary phenomena that are inseparable from a system of hired labor...
<p style="margin-left: 37%">
The process of reification amounts to the foundation of bourgeois society in so far as the creation of market values is concerned,
<br>
and must inevitably be generalized or reflected in the superstructure...
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
Max Weber and George Lukács,
<br>
and recently Erich Fromm and Lucien Goldmann
<br>
have been particularly insistent
<br>
on the fact
<br>
that
<br>
goods and money production is not only the configuration of the economy in a bourgeois society
<br>
but also the “soul” of such a society.
<p style="margin-left: 4%">
Usefulness,
<br>
profit,
<br>money,
<br>
quantification,
<br>
rationalism,
<br>
and instrumentalism
<br>
have thus saturated all realms of social life and thought.
<br>
Rationalism along with science
<br>
in this same circle
<br>
has become the enemy of humanism,
<br>
instrumentalism along with technology
<br>
the chief source of human alienation. ...
<p style="margin-left: 42%">
In fact,
<br>
the application of the category of totality in the social criticism of bourgeois society under the theory of reification
<br>
does not go beyond the dependence of the superstructure upon the foundation,
<br>
i.e.,
<br>
the dependence of the social totality upon a universal process termed reification,
<br>
so far as the essential determinism of social phenomena is concerned.
<p style="margin-left: 17%">
The starting point is an historically closed system,
<br>
viz., bourgeois society,
<br>
the analysis of which
<br>
comes down to a kind of
<br>
phenomenological reductionism
<br>
of
<br>
delusive phenomena
<br>
to
<br>
a fundamental and essential process of change.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
No determinism capable of transcending this particular historical situation has been taken into consideration, either as a preceding series or as a future series.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In what manner ought these theories to be subjected to correction?
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
First, it is necessary to transcend social, economic, class, cultural, and historical totalitarianism, and thus relativism in two senses,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
viz.,
<br>
in individual or personal terms,
<br>
and
<br>
in terms of world history.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In the first instance,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the category of
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
social totality
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deserves to be interpreted in relation to
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
“total social facts”
</mark>
(Marx, Mauss, Gurvitch).
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Let us recall no more than the following definition from Marx:
<br>
“Hence,
<br>
however much a human being should be a separate individuum,
<br>
and it is precisely his separateness which makes him an individuum and an actual individual being in the community,
<br>
he is likewise a totality,
<br>
the ideal totality,
<br>
the subjective existence of an imagined and experienced society in itself,
<br>
just as he exists in actuality at the same time as the perception and genuine spirit of social existence and as the totality of the human manifestation of life.”
<br>
(Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus [Leipzig: A. Kroener Verlag], Vol. I, p. 298.)
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Obviously, Marx has kept in mind the fact that both society and the personality are “total social facts”;
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
i.e., the whole social reality can be encompassed if we proceed from the one to the other and vice versa.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This reciprocity of perspective is based
<br>
in any event
<br>
on
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
dialectical relationship
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
that imparts
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
full independence
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
to the personality in the sense of an
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
ability to identify
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
with any other personality in the society
</mark>
(any
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
reduction
</mark>
of the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
art
</mark>
of a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
given artist
</mark>
to his
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
class origins
</mark>
being thus
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
illusory
</mark>
),
<br>
and an ability to identify with the entire society as a whole
<br>
(to transcend in consciousness narrower class or group interests),
<br>
and an ability to transcend the present day state of society—to anticipate the future as the “totality of the human manifestation of life,” not only in the name of the negation of that which is in existence, but also in the name of the entire historical experience of mankind.
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Well,
<br>
people who try to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
anticipate the future
</mark>
usually fail.
<br>
But it is not just the self-important,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
transcend</mark>ence-seeking
artist
<br>
who runs afoul of this limit on our clairvoyance
<br>
but also the reductionist social critic
<br>
who cannot imagine that the usefulness or appeal of artworks
<br>
could be capable of enduring or rearising.
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
Positivistic organicism
</mark>
is not only incapable of comprehending
<br>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
the role of the personality in cultural creativity
</mark>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
, but also finds
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
geniuses
</mark>
to be an
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
enigma
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
No less a figure than Lukács himself naïvely explains the survival of works of genius solely in terms of selection on the part of the ruling class from whatever in the past should serve the immediate interests of this class!
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In point of fact,
<br>
great cultural works live on
<br>
despite
<br>
all barriers of history and class
<br>
for the sole reason
<br>
that
<br>
such works have been created by personalities
<br>
distinguished for greatness or genius,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
i.e., such individualized social totalities
<br>
as have encompassed a maximum of “human totality”
<br>
in a personal creative act. ...
<br>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<!--
<h3>
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<br>
-->
<br><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In other words,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
the individual represents a specific determinant of cultural creation
<br>
precisely because as an individual he deserves to be a part of the analysis of the culture of a society.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
For example,
<br>
in terms of the universal process of reification
<br>
it is wholly incomprehensible why romanticism should have ignored the processes of reification while the realism that followed with Balzac did not ignore these processes.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Was it only because romanticism was “more reactionary” or less progressive than realism,
<br>or
<br>
was it because the romantics as human beings were less progressive than the realists
<br>
(e.g., Victor Hugo as opposed to Balzac)?
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The answer to the question indicates that to ask it is wrong.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Romanticism had no need to reflect reification,
<br>
for its aim was to express what was vital after the bourgeois revolution,
<br>
viz.,
<br>
a new conception and a new expansion of the human personality,
<br>
Promethean and autonomous.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This personal and sentimental expansion of a grand sensitivity proved very soon to be illusory when confronted with social reality,
<br>
but lost nothing thereby of its universal human and cultural value.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Let us remember that Romain Rolland went to combat in behalf of socialism via Beethoven.
<br>
Marx conducted himself in the same way with Phidias or Shakespeare,
<br>
even though the social organization inhabited by these geniuses could scarcely have been pleasing to him.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In other words,
<br>
we are obliged to keep track of the fate of human creation equally in the dimension of the class struggle and in the dimension of the human personality, <br>
at the level of human sociality and at the level of the artistic liberation of the personality.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Second,
<br>
cultural phenomena transcend the foundation-superstructure scheme and historical relativism in the sphere of world history,
<br>
by which we understand a continuous curve with all its internal contradictions throughout the historical epochs up to the present.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Such a curve is assumed to be wholly natural where advances in science or technology are concerned.
<br>
It is considered entirely understandable
<br>
and even inevitable
<br>
in these fields of endeavor
<br>
for new discoveries to be linked together with the older ones
<br>
and for such new discoveries to multiply increasingly, with the general curve of discoveries or cognition appearing in an exponential form,
<br>
i.e., as a curve with positive acceleration.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Positivistic organicism,
<br>
historical relativism,
<br>
and the theory of the rise and fall of cultures as worlds of their own
<br>
are
<br>
nevertheless incapable of encompassing such a kind of progressive alteration with constant upsurge within the bounds of their mode of thinking.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
We know that estheticians are opposed to the idea of progress in art,
<br>
but we also know that they have in mind in this connection solely the perfection of certain forms or the perfection of the esthetic experience itself.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In this sense,
<br>
we truly cannot say that esthetic expression actually advanced in terms of “the beautiful” and “the perfect” from the neolithic caves to the classical Greeks and from the classical Greeks to contemporary modernism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
On the other hand,
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
even if we have not advanced
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
esthetically,
</mark>
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
we have not necessarily failed to improve steadily in terms of
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the creative act proper,
</mark>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
in the discovery of creative potentialities,
<br>
in the analysis of expressional devices,
<br>
in the discovery of the various laws under which dead matter is configurated.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
We would not find it difficult to show that man has advanced as steadily in art as he has in technology,
<br>
which some so mystically counterpose to art,
<br>
forgetting that art is inseparable from craftsmanship.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Like the dance, primitive art is frequently incapable of esthetic error, but is nevertheless
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
wholly enslaved
</mark>
like
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
primitive realism
</mark>
by a subject that has not yet become the object of
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
critical reflection
</mark>
and is entirely bound up with a
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
syncretic world
</mark>
of
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
magic and mythology
</mark>
.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Only with the Greeks
<br>
did beauty begin to be discovered as a separate object of experience
<br>
and thereby as a separate theme of human creativity.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Only then were the laws of proportion, symmetry, and rhythm discovered.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Did not the Renaissance discover the laws of perspective for the first time,
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Actually, no,
<br>
at least not
<p style="background: tan">
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2022/06/mcluhanthe-ground-rules.html">according to McLuhan</a>
<br>
.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br><br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
just as the Baroque period was to discover light and shadow as the medium of the spiritual existence of an object devoid of sheer mass?
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
And what of today’s discovery that
<br>
“what is deserving of being depicted is not the object but rather the impression which the object makes upon us”
<br>
in the form of impressionism,
<br>
cubism,
<br>
and abstract art?
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Actually, this would vitiate most of what is constructive in all that has preceded it.
<br><br>
In point of fact,
<br>
can we <i>ever</i>
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
depict
</mark>
<br>
<i>anything</i> other than our
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impression
</mark>
<br>
(as against some ultimate essence or reality)
<br>
?
<br><br>
The question
<br>
as to which
<br>
among these
<br>
is
<br>most
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deserving
</mark>
<br>
is superfluous.
<br><br>
This is to say,
<br>
once someone has dared to ask it explicitly,
<br> we will be lucky if it remains
<br>
merely superfluous.
<br><br>
The are no stupid questions,
<br>
but there are stupid answers.
<br><br>
Also dangerous ones.
<br><br>
On the creation side,
<br>
there are <i>only</i>
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impression</mark>s.
<br><br>
That is not to say
<br>
that
<br>
there is no objectivity
<br>
on the reception side,
<br>
but
<br>
if you think you've found some
<br>
make sure to ask around
<br>
just to be sure.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
<br><br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
More careful analysis would show us that we are constantly witnessing genuine discoveries in relation to human modes of expression and to the way in which objects are represented throughout the entire evolution of European art,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
and that such discoveries have increasingly multiplied in modern times
<br>
(we need only remind ourselves of contemporary “applied art”),
<br>
to the extent that the kind of exponential curve found by the sociologists in the field of science and technology
<br>
could easily be constructed in the artistic realm as well.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
There can be no doubt
<br>
that
<br>
the cyclic phenomena
<br>
of
<br>
cultural upsurge and stagnation,
<br>
of
<br>
progressive élan and decadency,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
amount to no more than a separate rhythm within a more general and more universal process of change.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
For this reason,
<br>
we obviously will not have exhausted the meaning of a particular phenomenon
<br>
by
<br>
simply placing it within the framework of a process of progress and decadence. <p style="margin-left: 7%">
We must instead interpret such a phenomenon within the framework of the general process of historical change,
<br>
i.e.,
<br>
in terms of world history.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
For example,
<br>
a phase of decadence in bourgeois art set in with symbolism and impressionism in the light of the earlier ideo-affective expansion of humaneness,
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
yet the same phase no less surely marks the beginning of one of the most fruitful periods of cultural and artistic creativity in terms of the discovery of new potentialities and in terms of the constant enrichment of human sensitivity and imagination.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
And the development of human potentialities,
<br>
the development of all the most diverse and many-sided of human capabilities,
<br>
should be considered the fundamental law of historical evolution (cf. Marx).
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
...
<!--
Third,
<br>
the historical relativism of the theories of culture under discussion
<br>
is
<br>
incapable of explaining an extremely significant phenomenon in the process of cultural change,
<br>
viz.,
<br>
the many sided complexity of historical determinism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Specifically,
<br>
certain cyclic processes of change are totally exhausted in the course of a single historical epoch,
<br>
while certain other cyclic processes of change can be said to transcend a given epoch.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In other words, there are cyclic processes of change within a given historical epoch
<br>
(endogenous cyclic processes of change)
<br>
and cyclic processes of change above a given historical epoch
<br>
(exogenous or transcyclic processes of change)
<br>
.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
For example,
<br>
the process of change in terms of world history can be conceived as a constant uncovering and deepening of human expressional potentialities.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
To illustrate this phenomenon, however, we must take up an example which is close to us and can be easily understood.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In our <i>Psychology of the Bourgeois Lyric</i>...
-->
<!--
(Psihologija gradjanske lirike, Zagreb, published by Matica Hrvatska, 1952)
-->
<!--
, we described a cyclic process of change that began with romanticism and ended with surrealism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The ideo affective attitudes that led in romanticism to an expansion of sympathy toward humanity and the cosmos
<br>
led
<br>
in symbolism to stagnation and in surrealism to radical negation.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
A dead end had eventually been reached,
<br>
justifying those writers who reflected deeply on this process of change
<br>
and who arrived at the conclusion that the surrealists must be
<br>
“the last romantics”!
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The attempt to depict lettrisme as an imitation of abstract art is a kind of intellectual weakness,
<br>
for such an attempt mistakenly identifies technology with humaneness,
<br>
whether affirmed or negated.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
To be sure, a new cycle of cultural change set in with the appearance of impressionism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Impressionism comprised a certain amount of “technological interest,”
<br>
both in terms of thematic material
<br>
(locomotives, the St. Lazare railway station, the Eiffel Tower)
<br>
and in terms of procedures
<br>
(spectrum analysis, complementary colors, the granular fusion of colors, etc.),
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
and we find something kindred in the poetry of René Ghil and Paul Valéry.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
A certain constructivism and instrumentalism had evolved.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Since impressionism, this tendency has dominated modern art in all varieties of expression
<br>
up to and including
<br>
contemporary abstract or concrete art,
<br>
electronic music,
<br>
and lettrisme in poetry.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This “technological interest,”
<br>
subordinated to a greater extent in the beginning to certain humanistic preoccupations,
<br>
has grown increasingly independent in the course of time,
<br>
and recently even dominates some areas of endeavor.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
However, with reliance on concrete space in the field of architecture and in the manufacture of useful objects,
<br>
this “technological interest” is going to acquire a real foundation and is going to free itself of its romanticist and metaphysical proclivities.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Abstract art,
<br>
although closest in time to surrealism,
<br>
is immeasurably remote from it psychologically
<br>
and is incomparably far away from romanticism
<br>
and in particular from the
<br>
“night,”
<br>
“hallucinatory,”
<br>
and “grotesque”
<br>
varieties of romanticism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This circumstance only serves to confirm the fact that the cycle is
<br>
discontinuous and closed
<br>
if
<br>
we have the development of the romanticist component in mind,
<br>
yet continuous and open
<br>
if
<br>
we have the “technological component” in mind.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Is it not clear by now that a cycle in art is already ending in bourgeois society?
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This society is necessarily continuing with its technological and cultural potentialities,
<br>
while the “technological cycle” in art that derives its inspiration from science and technology
<br>
will necessarily be continuing apart from all limitations imposed by the class make up of society,
<br>
for which reason
<br>
the resistance of socialist realism in some countries to abstract art
<br>
is
<br>
as purposeless as it is futile and is bound to end in the same way as have kindred attitudes toward modern architecture, urban planning, and cybernetics.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
We can draw the conclusion from this example that courses of development and values with a multitude of meanings and senses come to light within the bounds of a given historical epoch, like all organic creations.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
While one conception or stylistic form is dying out, another is already being born and is present to be able to continue along the path of its own and uniquely different fate.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Fourth,
<br>
these theories are not capable of explaining the role of
<br>
the unconscious
<br>
in artistic creation,
<br>
especially in instances of stylistic change where the influence of a kind of collective unconscious is of particular significance.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Psychoanalysis has succeeded in explaining the influence of the unconscious
<br>
only in relation to
<br>
the content or theme of an artistic work,
<br>
not
<br>
in relation to stylistic changes.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
What is involved at this point is the fact that the unconscious in creation is not only a complex function of the intermediacy of experience in terms of the symbolization, projection, or dramatization of specific materials, but also a direct influence upon the very functional structure of the experience.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
If we desire to defend the thesis that the evolution artistic sensitivity from romanticism to surrealism comprises a closed cycle that has been exhausted and resolved on the basis of its own premises,
<br>
then we must take the internal dynamics of this evolution into account.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
These internal dynamics presuppose not only a change in specific experiential materials
<br>
but also
<br>
certain functional changes in the creative imagination, in which the unconscious plays a vital role as an intermediary.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
For example,
<br>
we have already pointed out that romanticism represents a certain expansion in sympathy in human and cosmic terms,
<br>
yet we also know that symbolism and impressionism mark a diminution of this affective expansion due to a general or collective state of mind which can be described as resignation.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The question thus arises as to what the significance and consequences of this diminution in the affective expansion may be.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
So far as functional changes are concerned,
<br>
we are in a position to observe the course of two simultaneous processes in symbolism.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The first is
<br>
the diminution of the humanistic expansion
<br>
along with
<br>
the transferral of this expansiveness to the realm of
<br>
the beautiful,
<br>
the disinterested,
<br>
and the formalized.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This is why the symbolists call themselves “cultivators of form,” “stylists,” or “the dispassionate ones.”
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The second such process involves the sensory or sensual component of the creative imagination,
<br>
which becomes stronger or more independent. The ideo affective expansion that had taken place during the romantic era in the realm of humanism
<br>
withdrew in symbolism and impressionism
<br>
to
<br>
the level of sensual relations with nature and things.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Friedrich Hebbel was right in remarking that this sensual expansion was based on a kind of “passive love” and on an ironic or Manichaean stance toward reality,
<br>
described so dramatically and so accurately by Baudelaire and Nietzsche.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
The shift of the humanistic expansion to the realm of sensuality occurred unconsciously,
<br>
being much more the product of the general spirit of the epoch
<br>
than of any rational reflection on the part of an artistic creator.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
And yet this change is the key to an understanding of essential changes in artistic expression,
<br>
for this diminution in the humanistic expansion
<br>
gave rise to a whole series of other characteristic changes in sensitivity, <br>
e.g.,
<br>
a feeling of intimacy and presence,
<br>
ambivalence of feeling,
<br>
sensory plasticity,
<br>
a tendency toward synesthesia,
<br>
hyperintellectualism in the creative process,
<br>
and
<br>
a return to the past in its naive and childlike aspects.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
This metamorphosis in sensitivity
<br>
has resulted in corresponding changes in artistic style
<br>
in such a way that an interdependence can be said to exist between structural changes in sensibility and artistic expression.
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
We could also show a similar metamorphosis to have taken place in the transition from symbolism to surrealism.
<br>
<br>
<h3>
[[///]]
</h3>
<br>
<br>
-->
<p>
<br><br>
Fifth, if it is correct to say that some cyclic processes transcend a given historical epoch, socioeconomic arrangement, or class society, while others do not, then an important methodological principle follows, viz.,
<i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
some
</mark>
contradictions within the bounds of a given social system are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
resolved in the course of time
</mark>
, but
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
other
</mark>
contradictions
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
arise to take their places
</mark>
</i>
.
<p style="margin-left: 4%">
Some contradictions become simple differences under the law of the progressive differentiation of society and culture, while other differences become new contradictions.
<p style="margin-left: 8%">
In other words, it is a mistake to make use of such simple contradictions as those between materialism and idealism, subjectivism and objectivism, progressivism and reaction, and the like, in the interpretation of culture. We must instead follow the development of every established contradiction to see whether it is being resolved in the course of time within the bounds of a given social system or not.
<p style="margin-left: 12%">
Marx had already noted in connection with economic development that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
some
</mark>
contradictions are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
resolved within the bounds of capitalism
</mark>
. We ought therefore to anticipate that such would be
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
an even commoner occurrence in the realm of culture
</mark>
, which is
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
more autonomous
</mark>
and is distinguished by
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
a higher coefficient of individual factors
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 16%">
We are thus faced with a peculiar dialectic that transforms contradictions into contrarieties and contrarieties into contradictions.
<p style="margin-left: 24%">
Let us attempt to illustrate with an example:
<br><br>
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 10%">
An
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
extremely ferocious campaign
</mark>
is being waged in some socialist countries today against
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
abstract art
</mark>
as the last, “most radical,” and most distorted, expression of bourgeois decadency in art.
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 15%">
This campaign takes into account only
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
certain
</mark>
of the spiritualistic speculations of the early Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. No consideration is given in this campaign to the actual context and function of the art that is involved, particularly in connection with the appearance of the Weimar Bauhaus and with the analysis of the modern conception of space and pictorial matter.
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 20%">
Nor do these criticisms take note of the fact that
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
abstract art protests against misuse in the name of its <i>concreteness</i>
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 25%">
The real reason for this failure of understanding is that this campaign and these criticisms are unaware of the fact that a contradictory cultural situation, in the form of an attempt to flee the concrete world, has <i>undergone a transformation</i> contrary to its own original intentions by becoming involved in the concrete world and in the ecological (urban planning) problems of this concrete world.
<p style="margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 30%">
Abstract art has thus ceased to be a negation of any world, bourgeois, socialist, or whatever. On the basis of contemporary spatial and pictorial concepts, abstract art has become a part of
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
the most real world possible
</mark>
; that is, it has become wholly neutral so far as differences of class are concerned.
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Again, let's be careful. (And honest!) Nothing is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
wholly neutral
</mark>
. But if the Expressive Fallacy is rightfully and righteously debunked, then it becomes much more difficult (<i>not</i> impossible, just highly improbable) for <i>any</i> artwork to be seen as either
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
distort</mark>ing
or faithfully reproducing
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
objective reality
</mark>
. Works still, even then, are probably quite far from
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
wholly neutral as far as difference of class are concerned
</mark>
, but this non-neutrality is no longer quite so squishy or animistic a concept as it has become in recent times. (Funny how well so-called
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
<i>ontological realism</i>
</mark>
jibes with the "animistic" worldview!) The <i>respect in which</i> they are neutral (or not) is no longer a matter of what they "say" but rather what they (and perhaps also what their authors) <i>do</i>. No one would be surprised if class and abstraction could be at least broadly correlated scientifically. Abstractionists need not fear or deny this. <i>Let's be honest</i>, though, and let's accept <i>nothing less than honesty</i> from any assessor of our actions.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 18%">
In this way, abstract art may equally be the concern of Catholics and Protestants, socialists and communists. Against the wishes of its initiators, abstract art has become only “one among others.”
<p style="margin-left: 9%">
The most intelligent theoreticians of abstract art would not defend its exclusiveness in the name of “progress,” going no further than to mention abstract art as one possibility among many.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Sixth,
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
modern cultural criticism in general
</mark>
has not yet acquired the habit of examining the significance or sense of cultural goods from the standpoint of the
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
actual function
</mark>
of these goods in relation to man. Abstract esthetic, ideological utilitarian, or economic commercial criteria are commonly taken into consideration. These criteria, which have a somewhat longer tradition in our civilization, are
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
easier to define
</mark>
. The problem of actual human needs and of determining the values of cultural goods in relation to human needs remains open, although contemporary social and psychological anthropology is beginning to touch on it on an increasing scale,...
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Our objections to these theories up to this point suggest that the determinism of cultural phenomena is far more complex than it appears at first glance. In a very general way, it may be said that the existence of differences in historical rhythms points the way to the existence of <i>three fundamental systems</i> in the determinism of cultural phenomena: society in its structuralism; the personality as a separately individualized and universal system of functions and needs; and, finally, the cultural areas proper with their own unique laws of development (science, philosophy, technology, language, art, etc.). There is no dispute today among researchers into culture about the existence of these three specific factors in cultural development. The argument begins when we attempt a closer examination of the significance and interrelations of particular systems. Our research is only now getting underway, but it is already clear that the existence and operation of these three systems will demand a <i>polydeterministic interpretation</i> of cultural evolution.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
Seventh, if it is correct that various cycles and rhythms of historical development exist and that these three systems require a polydeterministic interpretation, then we are faced with the problem of defining the <i>methods</i> of cultural research and cultural criticism more accurately. Although space does not permit us to go into this problem, let us at least point out that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
every </mark>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
one-sided</mark><mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
and </mark>
<mark style="background-color: pink; color: blue">
simplified</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
treatment of cultural phenomena must be </mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: pink">
excluded
</mark>
. The problem likewise excludes any vulgar materialistic limitation to the foundation superstructure scheme, any enclosure on the part of positivistic organicism within an exclusive course of progress and decadency, and any phenomenological reductionism to a universal basic process such as reification.
<br>
<br>
<p style="margin-left: 7%">
In what way ought we to approach the analysis of cultural phenomena?
</blockquote>
<p style="background: beige">
Stop. First, there has to be a <i>desperate, crying need</i> for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
analysis
</mark>
if it is to have any justification at all. If the need is anything less than <i>desperate</i>, then
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
analysis
</mark>
is superfluous. Speculation, theorizing, shooting the breeze...all of these things are great.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Analysis
</mark> by its very name, by the very name of the publications in which it appears and the names with which it is thereby associated,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
analysis
</mark>
has lofty pretensions, pretensions which match those of its intended audience, who lust for truth and certainty to the precise degree that truth and certainty are elusive in the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
treatment of cultural phenomena
</mark>
. Shooting the breeze is the stuff of life;
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
analysis
</mark>
, to the contrary, harbors <i>death</i> in its very name. Analysis creates <i>dishonesty without liars</i>.
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
Above all, no doubt, a phenomenological survey of the totality of the phenomena in a given cultural historical situation is in order. The phenomenological application of the category of totality for purposes of distinguishing the essential from the inessential, the profound from the superficial, and the fundamental from the secondary should naturally be the <i>first step</i> in such research. Yet a panoramic review of this kind will cease to be adequate the moment we ask ourselves the meaning of a given phenomenon in terms of duration in time. The problem will then have arisen of the complexity of the determinism of the given phenomenon—more profound study will undoubtedly discover, behind the statics of phenomenology, an increasing number of <i>generic</i> forms, which can be grasped only by means of <i>functional-structural analysis</i>. Just as the structure of the cultural and social situation has changed in the course of time, so also has the function of particular phenomena changed, and along with it the significance of such phenomena in the life of society and of individuals. The direction in which the functions, sense, and values of particular phenomena are changing can be determined only by <i>historical-comparative</i> study of the development of society and culture. In other words, these are three different methodological standpoints which necessarily complement rather than exclude each other. However, the mastery of these methodological viewpoints entails a thorough acquaintance with actual social and cultural happenings. Petty criticism and methodological onesidedness are commonly the offshoots of insufficient knowledge concerning various fields of culture, concerning the dependence of such fields of culture upon concrete social situations, and concerning the place of such fields of culture in the general currents of historical change. The superficiality which we encounter so often in this area in everyday criticism, as well as in more serious discussions, results partly from inadequate study of the cultural materials, but no less from a lack of the dialectical spirit that is based equally on comprehensive intuition and the logical elaboration of methodological procedures.
</blockquote>
-->
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***the abstract is real***
</h5>
Rudi Supek
"<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/supek/1965/cultural-criticism.htm
">Freedom and Polydeterminism in Cultural Criticism</a>" (1965)
in
<i>Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium</i>
ed. Erich Fromm
<i>"An extremely ferocious campaign is being waged in some socialist countries today against abstract art as the last, “most radical,” and most distorted, expression of bourgeois decadency in art. This campaign takes into account only certain of the spiritualistic speculations of the early Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. No consideration is given in this campaign to the actual context and function of the art that is involved, particularly in connection with the appearance of the Weimar Bauhaus and with the analysis of the modern conception of space and pictorial matter. Nor do these criticisms take note of the fact that abstract art protests against misuse in the name of its </i>concreteness<i> . The real reason for this failure of understanding is that this campaign and these criticisms are unaware of the fact that a contradictory cultural situation, in the form of an attempt to flee the concrete world, has </i>undergone a transformation<i> contrary to its own original intentions by becoming involved in the concrete world and in the ecological (urban planning) problems of this concrete world. Abstract art has thus ceased to be a negation of any world, bourgeois, socialist, or whatever. On the basis of contemporary spatial and pictorial concepts, abstract art has become a part of the most real world possible; that is, it has become wholly neutral so far as differences of class are concerned."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
-->Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-68793628102130770462024-03-11T18:28:00.000-07:002024-03-11T18:28:18.512-07:00The Sign of the Spectacle<br>
<p>
Mark Reybrouck
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257780016_Musical_Sense-Making_and_the_Concept_of_Affordance_An_Ecosemiotic_and_Experiential_Approach">"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"</a>
<br>
(2012)
<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.
<p align=justify>
Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.
</blockquote>
<p>
This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a <i>major part</i> of something or other, whereas the study of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
skilled performance
</mark>
and
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
special training
</mark>
necessarily comprises only a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">minor part
</mark>
.
<p>
Aside from the constant irony of the majoritarian impulse being cloaked so often in some very difficult academic verbiage, I think there are two important contradictions, or at least tensions, lurking beneath such statements as here. One is that it's not clear what exactly is urgent or necessary about understanding something that is, explicitly here, <i>not</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
special
</mark>
. Put another way, this majoritarian impulse demonstrates, apparently for decades worth of music-ish scholarship now, a constant affirmation and reaffirmation of its majoritarian-ness as the singular justification for the entire project, as if this were all some kind of exercise in democratic formalism. It is a justification which gets off the ground only by opposing itself to an existing
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
major emphasis
</mark>
, refusing to accept <i>quality</i> as the basis for such "emphasis" and insisting instead on <i>quantity</i>. The question of how and why we got here is properly beyond the scope of a paper like this, but one wishes (for once!) to revisit it in light of the nonstory that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Skilled performance
</mark> <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
is not the most common way of dealing with music
</mark>
.
<p>
The other tension is that the absence of <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">special training</mark> hardly betokens the absence of learning or conditioning. It probably betokens the absence of conscious, willful cultivation, but even this is not assured. This seems to be precisely the point of much of what follows, and it is a point I am eager to embrace. The problem, though, for such projects as Reybrouck's here is that rather than resolving the old minoritarian dilemma we have merely reinscribed it in the study of non-specialists. It is thus a tad disingenuous to wear one's majoritarianism on one's sleeve while also attempting to borrow some of the minority's prestige, i.e. to show that what the majority does is also complex, also involves agency, also can be studied and codified and published on and about, etc. Either we are interested in cultivated skills and sensibilities (and therefore in a minority) or we are not; shifting the focus away from music makers and onto <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">music users</mark> more broadly doesn't resolve this dilemma at all.
<p>
As unsightly as the old musicology can be to newer eyes, the fixation on all that is thought to be <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">special</mark> and the willful ignorance of everything else is itself precisely a demonstration of <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">affordance</mark> to rival any other presented here. What is unsightly is the culturally narrow orientation and the unearned privilege. But undertaking <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">years of special training</mark> is as close to truly earning privilege as it gets. The point is not that this is ever assured; it certainly is not. But when interest is made a function of the sheer number of people doing something rather than the quality of what they are doing, this all but assures results which "tell us in bad English what we already know." Where else but there can <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds</mark> really lead us?
</p>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
the central concept of affordance which
was introduced by Gibson...who stated that animals perceive their environment in terms of what it affords to the consummation of their behaviour. Being defined as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the perceived functional significance
</mark>
of an object, event or place for an individual, it points to an important quality of the world, namely that its features are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
meaningful
</mark>
for an active perceiver.
</blockquote>
...
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
There is...a certain similarity between von Uexküll's concepts of Merkwelt—the world of sensing—and Wirkwelt—the world of acting—and Piaget's notion of the ‘sensorimotor level'. Both authors were profoundly influenced by Kant's insights that whatever we call knowledge is necessarily determined to a large extent by the knower's way of perceiving and conceiving... The fundamental analogy, however, lies in the concept of circularity. von Uexküll, e.g., has elaborated on the concept of sensorimotor integration which he labeled as functional cycle or functional circle (Funktionskreis) and which describes
the basic structure of the interactions between the human and animal organisms and the
objects of their surrounding worlds. These interactions consist principally of two acts:
<blockquote>
<i>“Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps, receptor and effector. With the one it invests the object with a receptor cue or
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
perceptual meaning
</mark>
, with the other, an effector cue or
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
operational meaning
</mark>
. But since all of the traits of an object are structurally interconnected, the traits given operational meaning must affect those bearing perceptual meaning through the object, and so change the object itself.”</i> (von Uexküll, 1957 [1934]: 10)
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This ‘circularity’ of stimulus and reaction is a central attribute of epistemic interactions with the world. It means that every stimulus presupposes a readiness to react, and that this readiness ‘selects’ as a stimulus a phenomenon of the environment which had been neutral up to that point. The stimulus, then, must realise the reaction, and the reflexive action can only be described as a circular event, in which a neutral phenomenon receives a property which it does not have independently from the reacting organ, and which it loses again after the completion of this action. Circularity of stimulus and reaction, therefore, has two meanings: (i),
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
there can be no stimulus without the readiness to react and the stimulus ceases to be a stimulus with the cessation of the readiness to react
</mark>
, and (ii)
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
without a stimulus there can be no reaction
</mark>
(T. von Uexküll, 1986: 122-123).
<p align=justify>
The concept of circularity, further, is closely related to the conceptual framework of cybernetics, which brings together concepts as different as the flow of information, control by feedback, adaptation, learning and self-organisation... As a unifying discipline, it provides a common language for the description of adaptive behaviour in general. Starting from the common concept of (epistemic) control system, it embraces the four major elements of adaptive control—perceptual input, effector output, central processing and feedback—, relying on perception, action and the mutual relations and coordinations between them as their functional counterparts. ...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
<b>Semiotic and pragmatic claims: the legacy of Peirce, Morris and James</b><br>
The concept of circularity brings us to the pragmatic claims of Peirce who defined meaning in a rather
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
retrospective
</mark>
way,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
from effect to causes
</mark>.
</blockquote>
<p>
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/06/scairquotes-viithe-challenge-and.html">Uh</a>-<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/06/scairquotes-viiithe-determinist.html">oh</a>.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This is, in a sense, the core of his pragmatism or pragmaticism which defines the meaning and truth of any idea to be the result of its practical outcome or “conceivable sensible effects”. In what has become known as one of his most famous definitions of pragmatics, he emphasises the role of the cogniser as an active participant in the process of semiosis:
<blockquote>
<i>"Consider what effect that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."</i> (Peirce, 1905: 481)
</blockquote>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
In an original epistemology which he <i>[William James]</i> has coined as radical empiricism, he states that the significance of concepts consists always in their relation to perceptual particulars. What matters is the fullness of reality which we become aware of only in the perceptual flux. Conceptual knowledge is needed only in order to manage information in a more ‘economical’ way. As such, it is related to principles of cognitive economy:
<blockquote>
<i>“It is possible ... to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-sufficing, while at the same time one joins the empiricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only by combining it with perceptual reality again.“</i> (James, 1911b: 237)
</blockquote>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
Pragmatism, which can be considered as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
radical empiricism's companion theory of truth
</mark>...
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Up to now, musical semiotics has focussed mainly on syntactics and semantics. Music, however, has
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
inductive power
</mark> as well. Musical sense-making, therefore, should encompass also the effects music can have on music users. This is obviously the ‘pragmatic’ dimension of music, considered as a sign or a collection of signs as related to its interpreters. Musical semiotics, in this view, should be the science of musical signs with music users being considered as subjects that respond to ‘signs’ rather than to ‘causal stimuli’.
</blockquote>
<p>
There is an undeniable attraction to this, since the very possibility of ascertaining the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">syntactics and semantics</mark> of music almost always depends on faulty pretenses. (Dad: <i>"music has a syntax but not a semantics."</i> And some music of course takes the denial even of syntax as one of its guiding principles.)
<p>
The supersession of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
stimuli
</mark>
by
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
signs
</mark>
is less plainly attractive, at least to me, but I would venture that it does describe perfectly, in fact, the properly musical aspects of McLuhan's "implosion," most widely observable nowadays in the phenomenon of the iPhone Zombie shooting video of a performance.
<p>
I suppose this is precisely the type of issue which the project outlined above could be useful in approaching; useful, that is, only if we are not already committed to the interpretation that this behavior is so transparently stupid as to render superfluous the leveraging of heavy-duty semiotic theory and finely-tuned laboratory investigation. Without wasting our time on any of that, we can certainly say that iPhone Zombies are engaged in a "practice." There is no need to leverage sophisticated empirical or hermeneutic artillery to show that they are "active" rather than "passive" audiences in at least a nominal sense. We can see, also, with our own two eyes that age is not a perfect proxy for this techno-Zombiism, nor is it for many others. For once, mere observable behavior is sufficient to establish something important about reception, though of course it leaves much unanswered and unanswerable, as before. Perhaps a semiotic analysis can pick up where observable behavior leaves us off, but it cannot (or it damn well shouldn't) run inteference for things we can plainly see without any of its help. And what we see in the (admittedly extreme) example I have chosen is that the iPhone now literally <i>comes between</i> artist and audience.
<p>
I suspect this example is not fairly representative of the ground Reybrouck aspires to cover, but I find it worth dwelling upon anyway, for it also invites a pregnant comparison with McLuhan's "nonliterates," who "do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo." "The result," he says, "is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands." Whether or not he had all the gory details correct in such statements, and whether or not any given Zombie is fully "illiterate," it is hard not to think of the iPhone here as affording its user a sort of eye-hand synaesthesia which is, at the present moment of technological determination, practically irresistable to anyone who has not been explicitly conditioned against it. Hence trained musicians and musically sophisticated audiences continue to <i>fix their ears</i> in front of the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">stimuli</mark> du jour, while most everyone else detects the <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">sign</mark> for <i>spectacle</i>, the <i>same</i> visual sign regardless of the sounds emanating from it, as long as there are some.
</p>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This is a major claim of semiotic functioning: it stresses the emancipation from mere causality and time-bound reactivity to ever wider realms of spatio-temporal freedom and epistemic autonomy (Cariani, 1998: 243). Signs, however, are rather general and abstract in representing sounding reality. Music, on the other hand, is a sounding art, with the sonorous articulation as its primary category. The problem, therefore, is a possible tension between a general description of music at an abstract-symbolic level and the idiosyncrasies and particularities of the music as it sounds.
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
<b>Semiosis and the concept of interpretant: an operational approach</b><br>
Music is a sound-time phenomenon. It has the potential of being structured by music users, with levels of processing that range from direct reactivity to more elaborate reactions to the sounds. It is possible, therefore, to conceive of musical sense-making in terms of epistemic interactions with the sounds.
Starting from the music as it sounds,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
music users can delimit configurations and assign to them the status of signs
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<p>
Sure, they <i>can</i> do this. It sounds like a lot of work though. And if it's <i>not</i> a lot of work, I would think that either the notion of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
signs
</mark>
or the notion of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
music users
</mark>
has been emptied of any meaningful content.
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The result is a semantical system with signs as basic elements that build relations between signifying ‘means’
</mark>
—i.e. the material sign vehicles—and their
signified ‘objects’.
</blockquote>
Seriously? Is this not merely a five-dollar restatement of the most specious, threadbare, sentimentalist cliché of them all?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In building such a system one can proceed in a way analogous to the building of ‘syntactic systems’: defining elements with elementary meaning, putting them together in a basic set and formulating rule systems for defining signs and combining them to supersigns. Such a way of proceeding is classical in stating that meanings are static, discrete and objective. It is lacking, however, in not providing communicative interaction between the parties of a referential exchange. A transclassical model, therefore, defines the elements as
subjective, process-like and non-discrete (Maser, 1977). As such, it is related to <i>[Charles]</i> Morris’ process of semiosis, which can be defined in operational terms:
<blockquote>
<i>"Semiosis (or sign process) is regarded as a five-term relation - v,w,x,y,z, - in which v sets up in w the disposition to react in a certain kind of way, x, to a certain kind of object, y (not then acting as a stimulus), under certain conditions, z. The v's, in the cases where this relation obtains, are signs, the w's are interpreters, the x's are interpretants, the y's are significations, and the z's are the contexts in which the sign occurs."</i> (Morris, 1964: 2)
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This ‘pragmatic’ approach to sense-making brings us to Peirce’s notion of interpretant as an important operational tool in the actual description of the process of semiosis that goes beyond the dyadic Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified. Semiosis, in Peirce’s view, entails a ‘triadic’ relation between a sign (sign vehicle or representamen), an object and an interpretant, each of them being relationally interconnected...
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
This triadic sign function can be easily applied to music. Sounds, in this view, are not considered as objects (firstness) but as signs (secondness) that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
refer to something that has caused them
</mark>
and that can be interpreted by music users (thirdness).
</blockquote>
I obviously need some more seasoning in this area in order to understand how saying <i>w</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
refer</mark>s
to <i>x</i> because <i>w</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
has caused
</mark> <i>x</i> is saying anything at all.
<p>
But this buries the lead. Previously the author conspicuously omits <i>other people</i> from Gibson's term "affordance" ("the perceived functional significance of an <mark style="background-color: red; color: white">object</mark>, <mark style="background-color: grey; color: white">event</mark> or <mark style="background-color: blue; color: white">place</mark> for an individual"). Yet
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Morris">Wiki</a> sez:
<blockquote>
<i>
Morris's development of a behavioral theory of signs—i.e., semiotics—is partly due to his desire to unify logical positivism with behavioral empiricism and pragmatism.[3] Morris's union of these three philosophical perspectives eventuated in his claim that symbols have three types of relations:
<br>
<br>
to objects,<br>
to persons, and<br>
to other symbols.
<br>
<br>
He later called these relations "semantics", "pragmatics", and "syntactics".
</i>
</blockquote>
<p>
So,
<br>
what exactly
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
has caused
</mark>
<br>
any given music?
<p>
Most likely it is
<br>
<i>
another person</i>;
<br>
which is to say
<br>
that
<br>
the move from
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sign
</mark>
<br>
to
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
object
</mark>
<br>
isn't really about
<br>
about
<br>
majoritrianism
<br>
nor is it about
<br>
epistemology.
<p>
Rather,
<br>
it merely shows,
<br>
again,
<br>
that
<br>
<i>
extroverts ruin everything
</i>
<br>
.
<p>
In other words,
<p>
if we give up on that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
firstness
</mark>
<br>
by which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sounds</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
are</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
considered as objects
</mark>
<br>
we're not trading in elitism for populusm;
<br>
rather,
<br>
we're trading in universalism for particularism.
<br>
That is the whole problem.
</p>
<br><br>
<!--
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It is an important conceptual transition that fits in with Peirce’s pragmatic claims which state that the whole problem of meaning is not reducible to the study of the sign or sign vehicle but to the study of the sign user or interpreter and his/her disposition to react: " ...the problem of what the meaning of an intellectual concept is can only be solved by the study of the interpretants, or proper significate effects of signs."
(Peirce, 1965 [1907]: 326).
</blockquote>
-->
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
As Gibson put it:
<blockquote>
<i>“An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property: or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.”</i> (Gibson, 1979: 129)
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
von Uexküll argued in similar lines when he considered the particular qualities or functional tones of objects. A tree, for example, has different qualities with respect to the respective ‘Umwelten’ or subjective universes of animal and human beings that confer qualities on it: the tree can be a shelter for the fox, a support for the owl, a thoroughfare for the squirrel, it can provide hunting grounds for the ant, or egg-laying facilities for the beetle, and can be a source of valuable raw material for the forester (von Uexküll, 1957 [1934]: 73-
79).
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
It is a major claim of Gibson’s ecological psychology which has been stressed also by Michotte who stated that objects are experienced ultimately in terms of their functional significance for possible activities. As such, it is not fruitful to study perception in itself. Perception, on the contrary, must be treated as a phase of action in relation to the motor and intellectual activity of individuals. An object only affects behaviour in so far as it has meaning, and this only arises from its functional relations to the other objects, be they spatial or temporal relations, or relations of causality or purposiveness.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
There seem to be three major [404] possibilities <i>[i.e. "musical affordances"]</i>, which are all related to the activity signature of musical sounds: (i) the
production of musical instruments out of sounding material, (ii) the development of playing techniques in order to produce musical sounds, and (iii) the shaping of the sound by using modulatory techniques.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
All these examples refer to the productive aspects of musical affordances. They take as a starting point the raw material and what it affords for musical sound production. It is possible, however, to go beyond this productive level and to conceive of affordances also at the receptive level of experience. Affordances, in this extended view, embrace perceptual qualities, mood induction qualities and socio-communicative qualities, invoking aspects of sense-making, emotional experience, aeshetic experience, entrainment and judgments of value (Krueger, 2009, 2011; Windsor, 2004).
</blockquote>
<p>
And here we meet the question: are these things really afforded the music-user if that user only <i>thinks</i> they are afforded them? Or do we need evidence of these things <i>actually</i> being afforded? And can we even nail down well enough for “science” what that would even mean?
<p>
The more urgent research, perhaps, would try to find evidence that, say,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
socio-communicative qualities
</mark>
(whatever tf those are…) are in fact afforded (whatever tf it would mean to afford the user such things). Is this testable? What we already have are plenty of natural experiments demonstrating the contrary, e.g. we have (I am told) a Cancel Culture case against <i>Lassus Trombone</i>, a case built on reminding people of associations which the instrumental music no longer has for them. Clearly the socio-qualities of that music are lost quite easily in the surface, for if not then it would be unnecessary to reraise awareness of them.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
It is possible, finally, to bring together productive and experiential aspects of musical affordances as exemplified in the huge body of action and perception studies (see Gabrielsson, 1987; Repp & Miller, 2003). Music, in this view, is something that induces a kind of (ideo)motor resonance that prompts the listener to experience the sounds as if he/she is involved in their production (Reybrouck, 2001b). This is a claim which is somewhat analogous to the central version of the motor theory of perception, which means that motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system. As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, how many music cognition researchers does it take to point out that formal musical training changes the brain? All of them, of course! So while I would think the above tenable, the split between initiates and non-initiates is if anything more objective and pronounced here than most anywhere else: “involve[ment]” here is wildly different for each listener…and at that point any convergence toward essential or communicative experience seems thoroughly dashed.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<b>Conclusions and Perspectives</b><br>
Conceiving of musical sense-making in ecological terms has a lot of operational power.
</blockquote>
<p>
Is there anything at all to be made of the appeal to
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
operational power
</mark>
<br>
where "explanatory power" might better serve?
<p>
It’s easy to
<bR>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
operat</mark>e
<br>
when you don’t have to
<br>
explain
<br>
.
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
Emilio Ribes-Iñesta<br><a href="http://behavior.org/resources/123.pdf">WHAT IS DEFINED IN OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS? THE CASE OF OPERANT PSYCHOLOGY</a><br>
(2003)
<br>
<br>
quoting<br>
Houts (1994), "Operational analysis, behavior analysis, and epistemology in science
and technology studies"<br>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>
[112] Bridgman developed operational analysis as his means to cope with the specific context of the conceptual revolutions brought about in physics at the turn of the century and into the first quarter century of modern physics. The major shift of thinking that Bridgman perceived and attempted to illustrate by repeated examples of analysis was a shift
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
from
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
taking concepts to refer to properties of objects
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
to
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
taking concepts to refer to activities of the physicist
</mark>
. In this sense, concepts such as length and velocity were achievements of humans acting on the world rather than signifiers of properties of the world.
</i>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
...
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[113] Operational analysis stressed that the meaning of scientific terms had to do with the ways in which scientists used them, that is, with the operations, physical and linguistic, carried out during its applications. Bridgman (1927/1953) stated that:
<blockquote>
<i>
In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the
concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations. If the concept is physical, as of length, the operations are actual physical operations, namely, those by which length is measured; or if the concept is mental, as of
mathematical continuity, the operations are mental operations, namely, those by
which we determine whether a given aggregate of magnitudes is continuous. . . .
We must demand that the set of operations equivalent to any concept be a unique set, for otherwise there are possibilities of ambiguity in practical
applications which we cannot admit.
</i>
</blockquote>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
On the other hand, S.S. Stevens (1935) advocated what he called operationism as a philosophy of science. Stevens adhered to a conception of truth by agreement. ...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[114] According to Stevens, a procedure was required to define and validate
concepts. Such a procedure consisted in appealing to the concrete operations that determined the concept. An operation was defined by denotation of the gross
physical behavior performed in determining how a concept will be applied. Additionally, the definition should include an observable outcome of the operation. ...
<br>
<br>
For Stevens (1951):
<blockquote>
<i>
It is generally accepted that semantic rules should be in the nature of operational definitions. . . .Terms have applicability to objects or events when the semantic rules governing their use satisfy operational criteria. The sentences or formulas created by combining these semantically significant terms into propositions are empirically significant (have truth value) when their assertions are confirmable by means of concrete operations. (p. 3)
</i>
</blockquote>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[115] Operational analysis for Bridgman was a matter of pragmatics, that is, of how words are used in the context of a theory or a research practice. In contrast, for Stevens, operational analysis was related to the denotation of objects and events, using definitions as criteria for the semantic correspondence between words and objects. While Bridgman thought of operational analysis in terms of pragmatics, Stevens conceived operationism as a matter of semantics.
<p align=justify>
Operational definitions and the operational analysis of concepts are two different things. Operational definitions consist of the specification of procedures and expected outcomes (procedures used for producing and measuring a
phenomenon) as the necessary criteria for establishing that the terms defined are empirically meaningful. In contrast, the operational analysis of concepts involves
<p align=justify>
[116]
<p align=justify>
the <i>a posteriori</i> identification of the physical and/or verbal actions involved in formulating or applying a concept. Thus, operational analysis deals directly with the arguments, rationale, and criteria used in the construction and application of scientific concepts. Concepts are defined according to their use and to the circumstances in which they are applied, including concepts about procedures and operations. Because of this, and in order to avoid confusion regarding the use of the term “operational,” operational analysis should be better called a “functional analysis of concepts.”
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
Skinner’s early reading of Bacon seemed to shape in him a strong technological attitude towards knowledge. Smith (1992) <i>[</i>"On prediction and control. B.F. Skinner and the technological ideal of science"<i>]</i> examined this influence of Bacon on Skinner:
<blockquote>
<i>
Bacon’s (1620/1960) epochal declaration that “human knowledge and human power meet in one” (p. 39)—one of the Baconian principles that Skinner (1983) said governed his own life—is not a mere claim that contemplative knowledge can be put to human uses; rather it is the declaration of a different kind of knowing, in which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the power of producing effects is not simply
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the by-product of knowledge
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
, but rather
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the criterion of its soundness.
</mark>
With this declaration, the
</i>
</blockquote>
[117]<i>
<blockquote>
age-old distinction of fact and artifact is broken down, and the artificial assumes, in a sense, more value than the natural. . .artifacts are preferred as being specially revealing of nature’s ways. (p. 217)
</i>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
[124]
<blockquote>
<center>
<h3>
Concluding Remark
</h3>
</center>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Operant theory and radical behaviorism imply ontological assumptions about
behavior as the construct that best represents the properties and nature of
psychological phenomena. However, these assumptions (whatever they are) cannot
tacitly be founded on or expressed only in the form of operational definitions.
Operant concepts have been used as if they had multiple logical functions: they are
used as terms denoting operations (procedures), events, processes, and outcomes
(e.g., the terms “reinforcement and/or reinforcer,” “discrimination and/or
discriminative”). Although categories denoting operations are necessary in any
science, they do not seem to be enough to deal with the classification, explanation,
and prediction of behavior. Operational categories should be considered only as
descriptions of procedures and criteria being used in experimental or observational
interventions—but science seems to be something more than a self-description of
the scientist’s activities. ...
<p align=justify>
[125] At best, nowadays operant theory fulfills the role of a conceptual scheme organizing
technological operations, although the achievement of control does not seem to be
correlated with the parallel achievement of prediction and theoretical
understanding.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
Hasok Chang<br>
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/">"Operationalism"</a><br>
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition)
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Operationalism is based on the intuition that we do not know the meaning of a concept unless we have a method of measurement for it.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Bridgman was invited to address this conference <i>[the 5th International Congress for the Unity of Science in 1939]</i>, and chose to give a talk entitled “Science: Public or Private?”.[4] At this point it became clear that his enterprise was fundamentally at odds with the logical positivist project, despite the surface kinship:
<blockquote>
<i>
The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance, accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting that together constitute understanding are done by me, and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead. (Bridgman 1955, 56)
</i>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Positivists and behaviorists had embraced operationalism for precisely the opposite reason: they thought operations were public, objective and verifiable, unlike private experience. But Bridgman was insistent that operations were a matter for private experience. He could see no warrant in simply taking someone else’s testimony as true or reliable, or in regarding the report of an operation performed by someone else as the same kind of thing as an operation performed and experienced by himself. In a later paper called “New Vistas for Intelligence” he declared: “Science is not truly objective unless it recognizes its own subjective or individual aspects” (Bridgman 1955, 556).
<p align=justify>
Bridgman’s individualistic bent, both in epistemology and social life, was in stark contrast to the logical positivist vision of knowledge and society...
<p align=justify>
As Holton (1995a; 2005) reports from his first-hand observations, the privacy of operations (and the consequent privacy of science) was not an idle philosophical doctrine for Bridgman. In the lab he carried out as much of the work as possible with his own hands, using few assistants and crafting most of his instruments himself. ... In academic life Bridgman (1955, 44)
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
openly lamented the “intellectual fashion … of emphasizing that all our activities are fundamentally social in nature”
</mark>
. As for his social and political writings, they were often agonizing attempts to clarify, for himself, the place of the “intelligent individual” in society. He was unabashedly elitist, both on behalf of the gifted individual and of scientists as a group, and argued that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
giving appropriate special treatment to scientists would in the end benefit society
</mark>
(that is, all the individuals in society).
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, the only
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
benefit
</mark>
the Normies are interested in is for everything to be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
fundamentally social in nature
</mark>
, because that makes them the real experts in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
everything
</mark>
. In this the plebes and the navel-gazers are, for once, in alignment. The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
intelligent individual
</mark>
is shit out of luck.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Maila Walter observes (1990, 192–193): “Within the community of scientists and scientific philosophers, Bridgman had become the lone spokesman for a <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">radical existential subjectivism</mark>”, more akin to Rheinhold Niebuhr’s existentialist theology than to any commonly recognized philosophy of science.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
What Bridgman started up but never quite accomplished in a systematic and complete way was a philosophical analysis of science in terms of activities. Operations provide the philosopher (and the historian) of science with a very useful unit of analysis: actions or events, as opposed to objects, statements, beliefs, theories, paradigms, research programs, etc.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
To the casual reader, much of Bridgman’s writing will seem like a series of radical complaints about the meaninglessness of various concepts and statements. But he was not interested in skeptical critique as an idle and indiscriminate philosophical exercise. He got most worried when a concept was being extended to new situations where the familiar operations defining the concept ceased to be applicable. His arguments often had an iconoclastic flavor because he was exceptionally good at recognizing where a concept had been extended to new domains unthinkingly and most people were not even aware that the extension had been made.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
ULJANA FEEST<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7923210_Operationism_in_psychology_WHAT_the_debate_is_about_what_the_debate_should_be_about">"OPERATIONISM IN PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT THE DEBATE IS ABOUT, WHAT THE
DEBATE SHOULD BE ABOUT"</a>
<br>
<blockquote>
[133]
<br>
<center>
TWO NOTIONS OF “OPERATIONISM”
</center>
<p align=justify>
Roughly, we can distinguish between two theses that are frequently attributed to operationism, an epistemological thesis and a semantic thesis. According to the epistemological thesis, all knowledge claims have to be reducible to actual or potential observations (see Salmon,
1985). According to the semantic thesis, the meaning of a concept can be exhaustively defined
by stating particular operations and their observational results. Both of these theses are commonly associated with the philosophy of logical positivism. Therefore, I will dub this construal
of operationism the “positivist” reading of operationism. In this section, I contrast this reading
with my own “methodological” reading of operationism
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
<i>
Operationism: The Methodological Reading
</i>
<br>
The thesis of this section is that psychological operationism was never intended as a theory of meaning or a theory of knowledge in the philosophical sense. By this, I mean that psychologists did not intend to say, generally, what constitutes the meaning of a scientific term. Nor
did they intend to provide a general account of justification for scientific knowledge. This does
not mean that semantic and epistemological questions were of no concern. Thus, I believe that
in offering operational definitions, scientists were <i>partially and temporarily</i> specifying their
usage of certain concepts by saying which kinds of empirical indicators they took to be <i>indicative</i> of the referents of the concepts. ...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[134] I will argue in the next section that these types of “definitions” did not have the status that philosophers usually associate with the term—i.e., they did not have the status of <i>a priori</i> knowledge or analytical truths. Rather, they were <i>either</i> temporary assumptions about typical empirical indicators of a given subject matter, which allowed researchers to get empirical investigations
“off the ground”, <i>or</i> they were presentations of the <i>outcomes</i> of experiments, which were assumed to individuate a given phenomenon particularly well. Thus, on my construal, they had a <i>methodological</i> function. Regarding the question of whether operationism was intended as an empiricist epistemology, it may be helpful to distinguish between two notions of epistemology. According to the first notion, the aim of epistemology is to provide a theory of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
what it would take
</mark>
to justify
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
existing
</mark>
systems of knowledge. According to the second, the aim of epistemology is to formulate guidelines for
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the acquisition of new knowledge
</mark>
. This latter notion of epistemology may also be referred to as
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
“methodology”
</mark>
(I take this distinction from Dingler, 1936/1988). While philosophers are traditionally interested in the former, it is a contention of this article that early psychological operationists, as practicing experimental scientists, were interested in the latter.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<p align=justify>
<i>
Operationism: The Positivist Reading
</i>
<br>
As is well known, the epistemological and semantic tenets of positivism were, for related reasons, soon recognized as problematic, and were subject to gradual changes and refinements until the 1960s... In a nutshell, it was recognized that (a) there are statements, which scientists take to be justified, even though it is impossible to exhaustively rephrase them in terms of observation sentences, and (b) there are statements about objects, which we intuitively recognize as meaningful, despite the fact that the concepts that occur in those statements cannot be exhaustively defined in terms of operations and resulting observations. The epistemological recognition led to the insight that a theoretical sentence cannot be verified, but at best confirmed, by observations. This implies that the meanings of such statements cannot be reduced to methods of verification.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[136] “to experience is, for the purpose of science, to react discriminately”... Did he <i>[S.S. Stevens]</i> mean by this that the expression <i>experience</i> has the same meaning as <i>discriminative behavior</i>? Did he mean that the presence of discriminative behavior is always a necessary and sufficient condition for the correct application of the term <i>experience</i>? Based on his research, I think that this is clearly not what he has in mind. Rather, Stevens <i>presupposed</i> that experience of tonal volume or density is phenomenal (and thereby, presumably, that the phenomenal aspect is an integral part of the meaning of the term). The question, for him, is how to “get at” <i>particular kinds</i> of phenomenal experience <i>in an experimental context</i>. His assertion is that this can only be done via the behavior of the organism—i.e., that in an experiment, discriminative behavior is a necessary condition for attributing conscious experience to an organism. Having devised an experiment that elicits such behavior in a regular fashion, he concluded, “[w]e are justified in saying that volume is a phenomenal dimension of tones” (1934a, p. 406).
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
Now, what about the “definitions” of tonal density and volume that Stevens offered <i>as a result</i> of his empirical investigation? While Stevens seemed to think that the criteria offered in his definition of tonal volume were sufficient conditions for the applicability of the term, I don’t believe that he took them to be <i>necessary</i> conditions. This point is related to the question of whether he was an antirealist about the referent of the concept. I believe that the fact that he conducted research on the neurophysiological basis of the experience of tones (see Stevens & Davis, 1936, 1938) shows that he believed the concept of tonal volume to be physically realized. This suggests that (a) he took the term <i>consciousness</i> to be more than a logical construct or a useful fiction (i.e., that he was not an antirealist about its referent) and (b) he would have been open to the possibility that it might in principle be detectable in more than one way (i.e., that the operational definition he offered was not intended to state necessary conditions for the applicability of the term). The status of his “definition,” I would like to suggest, was that of an empirical finding that was taken to confirm the existence of a phenomenon. This leads us to our last question—i.e., whether Stevens took either of those two types of “definitions” to be <i>a priori</i> true or unrevisable. The answer, I believe, is quite explicit in his own writings. He thought of definitions as factual statements that can be changed.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
PAUL MARSHALL
<br>
<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707366
">"SOME RECENT CONCEPTIONS OF OPERATIONALISM AND OPERATIONALIZING"</a>
<br>
(1979)
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[50] three of the important questions which operationalism has raised. One is the question as to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
what conditions have to be fulfilled in order to make sure that the application of different methods does not alter the object under investigation
</mark>
. Secondly,
<mark style="background-color: lightgreen; color: grey">
on what basis do we assert that we are dealing with the same object when we are using different methods to investigate it
</mark>
? This is a particularly important question in the social sciences. Finally, operationalism poses the problem of
<mark style="background-color: lightblue; color: brown">
the extent to which an object of empirical study is dependent on the instruments used to investigate it
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[60] Shiveley suggests that a measure be correlated with another measure which one is „certain” is strongly related to the concept. This, however, merely shifts the question, for how is one „certain” that this other measure does correspond to the theoretical item? The mathematical techniques of validity will not do the job. Using further criterion validity checks will merely shift the problem still further. We are still left with the question of why we think this indicator corresponds to this concept, the question of face validity.
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
The only way in which one can say if two things are related to one another in this way is if we have some idea of what they both are. To
<br>
[61]
<br>
do this we must have some conception of what the theoretical terms refer to. ... <i>[e.g. an intelligence test]</i> Various forms of validity checks can be used to determine whether the various parts of the test all point to the same phenomenon. Nevertheless, we use or discard intelligence tests according the whether their results appear to correspond to that human trait, or perhaps set of traits, which we call intelligence. ... We would conclude, I hope, that a most technically sophisticated, highly intercorrelated test which consistently gives chimpanzees higher scores than philosophers may have got of something very interesting, but that it was not measuring intelligence.
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
Similarly if we are concerned with a measure, or any indicator, of such a phenomenon as conservatism we accept it because the particular features of the measue correspond which what we regard as the features of conservatism in a person. In fact we have to know what set of traits conservatism refers to in order to set up a measure of it in the first place. Otherwise we literally do not know what we are talking about. As Karl Deutsch pointed out, „counting is repeated recognition,” „nothing can be counted that has not been recognized first.” Similarly if we are vague about what our theoretical terms refer to, then we can only be vague as to wether <i>[sic]</i> our indicators indicate them. To quote Deutsch again..., „simulation at best cannot be much better than our understanding of that it is we are simulating.
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
All this points to the fact that theoretical terms must refer to something in our experience, or must be related to other theoretical terms which have reference in our experience. As Bridgman himself pointed out, we must relate an operational formulation to „an intuitive knowledge of the language or ordinary experience. The theoretical terms must point to something we can recognize and distinguish from other things, and not solely via the use of operational indicators.
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
(b) This viewpoint finds support when some further features of a theory/empirical distinction are considered. Despite the fact that such a distinction played a large part in his own view of the logical structure of scientific work, Carl Hempel ultimately expressed the view that such a distinction could probably no longer be maintained. This doubt has
<br>
[62]
<br>
since become radical for many other authors... Some authors have maintained that whilst a theoretical/empirical distinction may be necessary in areas of physics, because we have no naive experience of such things as electrons, it is nevertheless of doubtful coherence or use in the social sciences.
</blockquote>
Well, is there not <i>much</i> which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the social sciences
</mark>
take as their subject matter of which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
we have no naive experience
</mark>
? i.e. The non-transferable
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
naive experience
</mark>
of our research subjects themselves, the voters, the consumers, (and yes) the listeners?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Indeed, in considering the model of scientific work taken from nuclear physics which has had some vogue in the social sciences in North America, May Brodbeck was moved to ask, „Why should they hunger after the complexity of the invisible?” ...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
Consequently, it must be concluded that a radical distinction of the type offered by operationalism, between theoretical concepts and empirical terms, is, in fact, impossible to maintain.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>
[63] If one dit <i>[sic]</i> not know what sorts of phenomena to classify or not to classify under the rubric of „authoritarianism” then it is difficult to see how any theory would be or could be formulated in the first place. If one merely held that „authoritarianism” was a „non-observable” theoretical concept then one could do little to refine or specify the term other than to make sure it conformed to the criteria of a particular theory. If specification were attempted by means of an operation, such as an „authoritarianism” scale, then, if the term authoritarianism is left undefined by other means, the scale will be an indicator of something we know little about. If this is true it is difficult to see how one could assert that the scale is in fact an indicator of it.
</blockquote>
<p>
Okay, we have travelled awfully far afield here, but this part does seem crucial to keep in mind vis-a-vis properly musico-logical, musico-sociological, and musico-psychological scholarship. In those areas, I think, it's not very sporting to hold on to the claim of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
radical
</mark>
uncertainty that I have occasionally succumbed to over the years. Still, I can't shake the impression that in music we frequently do not even agree as to <i>what</i> we are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
observ</mark>ing,
let alone how to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
specif</mark>y
it theoretically; also that such disagreement breaks down along predictable lines of experience, i.e. distanced/pure scholars versus musicians-in-the-trenches (I wonder if purely psychoacoustic, non-"musical" or a-"musical" laboratory work is not blissfully free of such divergences because it has already withdrawn itself from the pragmatic level? which sounds useless, but actually it is <i>a thousand times more useful</i> to <i>working musicians</i> than semiotics!!); and also, in the most elementary way, that even armed with an agreed-upon descriptive-theoretical vocabulary, the ultimate divergence can only resurface in the choice of research topics, i.e. in triaging the questions-in-search-of-answers from the answers-in-search-of-questions.
<p>
It's possible that I'm just howling at the moon these days in positing this sort of "divergence," doubly so in caring one pube about it given that roughly 0.00000001 of the nearly 8 billion people on the planet care even that much. But I <i>would</i> indeed hold on, to the bitter end, to the blind stab that <i>something</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
non-observable
</mark>
<i>must</i> be, somewhere inside of us, churning away, and that persistent "divergences" in mere preliminaries as described above by Marshall is one small meta-empirical indicator in favor of this ultimate limitation on the pragmatist enterprise as represented here by Reybrouck.
<p>
That is to say that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
we have no
</mark>
more
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
naive experience
</mark>
of being in anyone else's head but our own than we have of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
such things as electrons
</mark>
. It could be further argued, again at the risk of courting a merely obstinate <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
radical</mark>ism,
that we truly know very little, or nothing at all. I would like to think that there would be, even given such an ultimate material nihilism, some useful work waiting to be done on the level of pragmatic social fictions; which is to say that I for one am willing to entertain all of this ecosemiotic mumbo jumbo <i>on that level</i>, that is, <i>its own</i> explcitly stated level, "limited" as it may be. I still am unsure of which urgent question it is the answer to.
<p>
In any case, perhaps Stephenson had something of the same inkling in holding that
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The </mark>[<i>R</i>]<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green"> methodlogy suffers,<br>
however,<br>
from the limitation<br>
that<br>
all measurement in it<br>
is<br>
</mark><mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">relative</mark><mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green"><br>
to</mark><br>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">the samples</mark>,
</blockquote>
and that
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is </mark>[therefore]<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green"> difficult,<br>
if not impossible,<br>
to<br>
find any beginning point<br>
or<br>
absolute zero<br>
from which to begin<br>
to make measurements</mark>...<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">What I have done<br>
in Q-methodology<br>
is<br>
to discard<br>
these<br>
differential<br>
and<br>
parent person-population<br>
methods</mark>...<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">in favor of<br>
a </mark><mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">comparative</mark><mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green"> one<br>
based on<br>
</mark><mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">the single case</mark>.
<br>
<br>
...
<br>
<br>
A <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">parent population of persons</mark> is postulated, in <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">the large-sample doctrine</mark>, as involving <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">"chaotic elements"</mark>; <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">people are so complex</mark> that it is considered better to start with the assumption that for anything one can consider about human beings and their behavior the law of error will apply. Thus,...the endeavor is to reduce error to a minimum by using large numbers of cases...
</blockquote>
<hr>
<br>
<p>
Gerald C. Cupchik
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270598826_The_Evolution_of_Psychical_Distance_As_an_Aesthetic_Concept">"The Evolution of Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept"</a>
<br>
(2002)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
[178]
<h3>
Synthesis
</h3>
<p align=justify>
The two dominant approaches to aesthetic distance describe external and internal models. The Enlightenment and Empiricist traditions emphasized realism and the ways that an artist or playwright’s carefully constructed representations of the world could externally modulate experiences of pleasure and excitement. This external model is based on the mundane premise that people spontaneously engage in acts of cognition to recognize familiar objects and universal themes from everyday life, and generally experience feelings of pain or pleasure associated with them. The evocative potency of the work diminishes psychical distance in part because of the immediacy of this effect and the fact that the locus of emotion is perceived as ‘out there’ in the aesthetic artifact or event that caused the experience in the first place. According to this model, attachment (i.e. close psychological distance) should be to works that evoke positive feelings or excitement in accordance with the recipient’s affective needs.
<p align=justify>
This concept of a work as an ‘aesthetic object’ applies best when it is approached in the context of action. The context of action is inherently purposive in nature and involves a pragmatic attitude on the part of the person. Approaching a work as an aesthetic object within a context of action can imply different things. It may be seen as a commodity with a certain monetary value to be collected or to be given to a museum because of its tax-deduction value. Similarly, an artist can produce artworks repeatedly in a particular style because there is a market for them. A work can be viewed systemically in the context of action if only some of its qualities are relevant, as in the case of a decorative piece that fits into a particular setting. Aesthetic distance in the context of action
<p align=justify>
[179]
<p align=justify>
would then be based on the approach or avoidance value attached to
the object.
<p align=justify>
Scholars in the Romantic tradition, on the other hand, focused on the role of the recipient in constructing an interpretation of the meaning of a work. Acts of imagination provide an internal way to synthesize sensory and symbolic qualities of the multilayered aesthetic artifact or event into a coherent whole. Treating the aesthetic work as if it were real requires a willing suspension of disbelief (that the work is not absolutely faithful to the literal world) and an effort at finding meaning in the piece. This applies to artist/authors and recipients alike, who, at the higher levels of appreciation, engage in both ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’. These Gestalt-like acts of closure also depend on the perspective (i.e. understanding, vision both literally and metaphorically) that artists/authors and recipients bring to creative works. It is here that context (i.e. knowledge, personal and social relevance) shapes perspective, which in turn determines what is real for the creative person and the recipient. Thus the internal experience of the person provides a ground for the aesthetic episode and is the locus of the unfolding meaning and emotion. When the structure of a work is personally, intellectually or emotionally meaningful to the artist/author/recipient, distance is reduced between them and an attachment is formed.
<p align=justify>
A common framework is needed a priori in order to synthesize these two approaches. Objects and the artifacts that denote them have both material sensory qualities that define them perceptually and symbolic meaning that identifies them linguistically. In everyday cognition, there is a bias in favor of identifying useful objects, and sensory qualities are automatically discarded on route to object recognition. However, aesthetic episodes are unique because both material sensory and symbolic qualities are attended to and merge in a unified experience. In fact, artists and authors intentionally manipulate sensory qualities to make them salient and reawaken our sensibilities, thereby making us aware of the process of perception itself. It is this process of de-automatizing perception from the cognitive bias of everyday life that constitutes a first step in aesthetic education.
<p align=justify>
The integration of these qualitatively different material sensory and symbolic qualities into a coherent whole provides a cross-modal challenge for both the artist and the audience. The aesthetic attitude provides an opportunity for integrating sensory and symbolic information, structure and sign, style and subject matter, into a coherent experience without concern for its functional value. The more representational a work, the more the sensory qualities are subsumed within
<p>
[180]
<p align=justify>
the symbolic ones to maximize verisimilitude. The less representational a work, the more the sensory qualities take on a life of their own in the form of a style, and the more difficult it is to ‘read’ the work unless the underlying code of order is known. This balance between symbolic and sensory qualities, usually referred to as subject matter and style, affects the relative distance between the person and the work.
<p align=justify>
The context of experience focuses on the whole encounter with a work and is valued intrinsically. Approaching a work in the context of experience has interesting implications in terms of treating it as an object or as a system. Artists, particularly during modern times, have sought to affirm the surface of an artwork as a thing that occupies space. One reason for doing this was to eliminate views of artworks as mirrors of, or windows onto, reality. In modern art this was accomplished by affirming the two-dimensionality of a piece and reducing illusionary depth of space. Therefore, it is possible to experience a work of art in its thingness or sensory materiality. Qualities like impasto (i.e. thickness of surface paint) can make viewers feel like reaching out to touch the salient surface. Thus, implied tactile qualities of a work as an object can reduce aesthetic distance.
<p align=justify>
However, it is in a systemic view of artworks that the context of experience plays a more significant role. Experience can be shaped by relational meaning within the sensory qualities of the work. The overall compositional structure of a work in and of itself shapes experience unbeknownst to the viewer (though manipulated intentionally by the artist). This does not merely refer to the placement of objects in a rendered scene for the purpose of creating balance or tension. The very selection and juxtaposition of colors according to principles of complementarity and contrast can create the illusion of space or even of motion. Once subject matter is thrown into the mix, experience extends to all domains of symbolic meaning, both social and personal.
<p align=justify>
As many scholars have noted, digressions into the self through evoked associations serve to distance the person from the work. However, this is avoided to the extent that the viewer works to integrate the physical/sensory and symbolic levels of meanings in the search for coherence. Resonance between these two seemingly disparate domains engages the viewer because structure in the sensory domain serves as a metaphor for the symbolic. Thus, the theme of isolation can be effectively communicated by appropriately situating a solitary figure, but it is experienced more fully, and metaphorically, though the creation of a highly enclosed space.
<p align=justify>
The work loses its object quality in the context of experience, where it
<p>
[181]
<p align=justify>
possesses both structure and indeterminacy. Thus, there is some kind of order involving subject matter and/or style but, because the levels have some autonomy, there are many different ways to perceive and interpret it. The interaction with the artist/author is governed by an attempt to bring coherence (unity amidst diversity) to relations between the manipulated medium and its effects in the unfolding work, while preserving maximum uncertainty in the synthesis. A successful painting is one in which an attempt to make a visual statement is appreciated by cognoscenti who can work backward to uncover the evolution of the piece from the perspective of the artist. The audience, too, tries to bring coherence to the unfolding interpretation and accompanying experience. But the audience members start with the whole and must analyze the structure embedded within, and only the most experienced can readily do so. The greater the number of dimensions or levels of the work that the audience members can discern and appreciate, the richer their experience. The more they engage the work interpretively, the greater will be their pleasure.
<p align=justify>
Absorption defines a condition wherein the boundaries between the person and the aesthetic work, understood as open systems, are minimized. It would be highest when: (1) the symbolic meaning or perceived subject matter of the work elicits clear personal associations in the recipient, and (2) the sensory experiences elicited by the work give experiential form to the symbolic meaning. Since the locus of construction is within the recipient, the boundaries between the work and the recipient are minimized and the experienced connection is heightened. A trade-off between subject matter and style becomes relevant here if negative affect is elicited. Under these circumstances, an intellectualized attention to style reduces excessive affect and moves the recipient to a more comfortable position relative to the work.
<p align=justify>
It is also important to address communal absorption in aesthetic works that are incorporated into social or religious rituals. While artifacts from small-scale societies are ‘aesthetic objects’ and considered collector’s items by people from large industrialized states, they are systemic virtual objects for members of the source society. Each virtual object conveys important information about the social structure and beliefs of the society, while embodying dynamic and expressive qualities as well. Together they give the work an ‘aura’, an evocative quality that arouses intensified consciousness of shared meanings, while providing the soothing feelings that result from collective experiences or ‘happenings’. Absorption thereby becomes an intersubjective cognitive and emotional event. Scheff’s (1979)
<p>
[182]
<p align=justify>
treatment of ritual emphasizes the role that it plays in catharsis, the spilling of pent-up emotions in a safe collective context. Popular culture can be seen in a similar light as providing collective emotional associations for people raised in a particular historical era. In essence, it makes it possible to express pent-up emotions in a subculture, and provides an affective marker for the feelings of a generation. Stories can also be seen as raising consciousness and moral valuation. Chassidic story-telling, for example, has used simple but engaging language to increase people’s awareness of moral and spiritual aspects of daily life.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Detachment refers to a situation in which the context of action outweighs in importance the context of experience.
</mark>
At an individual level, it might involve the purchase of an ‘aesthetic object’ based on some criterion external to it, such as value based on market parameters (i.e., notoriety of the artist, availability of his/her works, and so on). Detachment can also occur even when a work is treated systemically. Someone might experience sympathy (as opposed to empathy) for the circumstances of situated characters depicted in paintings, dramas, and so on, but ‘not want to get involved’, so to speak. One could not accuse the person of failing to attend to the play, but it simply does not have an affectively evocative quality. This might reflect the topical nature of the subject matter, which is alien to individual members of an audience who are unfamiliar with the issues.
<p align=justify>
Communal detachment is a phenomenon of large-scale societies and can be attributed in part to the effects of mass media. Television and the internet, while providing speedy and unparalleled access to information, also provide a large-scale frame around both good and bad events taking place in the world. This creates a sense of detachment as one observes possible horrors at a safe and sometimes voyeuristic distance. Thus, while media can bring us knowledge about problems in far-away lands or even in our back yards, they also affirm our separation from them. At the same time, one cannot put the blame on a medium in and of itself. As a complex system it functions simultaneously at many levels. While writers, cinematographers, costume designers and others might work collectively to create aesthetic programs, they are potentially constrained by the forces of globalization and corporate power. The shaping of programs might work downward from the hierarchy of power, favoring particular themes, and desiring to produce agreeable feelings that favorably dispose people toward the products linked with them. While new larger and more detailed formats of films are becoming available, they temporarily
<p>
[183]
<p align=justify>
serve to attract perceptual attention. But once the novelty wears off, the same problem prevails.
<br><br>
<h3>
Conclusions
</h3>
<p align=justify>
The two streams from which modern aesthetic theory flows are based on different ontologies. The Empiricist view is fundamentally mechanistic and assumes a kind of realism according to which the structure of objects and events in the physical world do two things. First, they operate through the equivalent of affordances or constraints that determine the image experienced by viewers according to the criteria of everyday perception and cognition. Second, the Empiricists assume that these objects and events manipulate emotion along a dimension of pain versus pleasure, and leave memories that serve as markers for them. Not surprisingly, the ideas of the taste theorists were formulated in relation to representational paintings, which provide the clearest examples of mimesis, an attempt to copy the physical world. Aesthetic distance reflects an awareness of the work as a cultural artifact and is aided by the stylistic manipulation of a medium that makes the materiality of the work salient.
<p align=justify>
The Romantic tradition is more vitalistic in its approach and is sensitive to the organic development of the experience as encounters with cultural artifacts unfold in time. It also emphasizes the constructive efforts of individuals and audiences in the search for meaning. Given that meaning is indeterminate, it is impossible to use truth as a criterion of aesthetic appreciation. Rather, the contexts associated with an aesthetic episode will shape the interpretive process. Theoretical developments occurred in relation to drama and the problem of distinguishing reality from unreality. While the real is part of an intersubjectively shared world, the unreal is wrapped up with hope and fantasy, both individual and collective. Since both themes are present in dramatic works, the audience must ‘willingly suspend disbelief’ and go along with the imitation or simulation of events in the dramatic world that re-creates social episodes.
<p align=justify>
Aesthetic distance helps situate the person with reference to an aesthetic event. It involves an awareness of the event as such, be it a painting or a performance, as different from, though meaningfully related to, the everyday world. It preserves the aesthetic viewpoint, one in which sensory and stylistic qualities are given a standing of equal importance with symbolic subject matter. A ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is essential if the person or audience is to set aside the everyday criterion of singular referential meaning. The combination of
<p>
[184]
<p align=justify>
both sensory and symbolic meaning provides the artist/author with an opportunity to create new stylistic codes or meanings. The viewer or listener also becomes engaged in a process of synthesizing meaning, and this affords the experience of both challenge and pleasure in the interpretive process. Grounding the aesthetic experience in culturally shared knowledge and becoming aware of the interpretive process itself are important aspect of aesthetic episodes. Rather than juxtaposing realist and constructivist ontologies, they should be viewed as complementary with the framework of ‘constructivist realism’ (Cupchik, 2001).
<p>
<i>[many, many italics and several citations omitted]</i>
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
Jean-Luc Jucker and Justin L. Barrett
<br>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270638188_Cognitive_Constraints_on_the_Visual_Arts_An_Empirical_Study_of_the_Role_of_Perceived_Intentions_in_Appreciation_Judgements">Cognitive Constraints on the Visual Arts: An Empirical Study of the Role of Perceived Intentions in Appreciation Judgements</a>
<br>
(2011)
</p>
<blockquote>
[115]
<p align=justify>
<i>"From infancy babies automatically represent artefacts partly in relation to how they might be manipulated, apparently as a way to conceptualize their possible use or function. Similarly, adults assess
artefacts partly according to their function. This springboard from manipulability to functional utility is absent from most works of art however, as it is for printed text or signs. Typically, works of art
<p align=justify>
</i>[116]<i>
<p align=justify>
cannot be readily manipulated, and are neither created nor used to achieve purely practical goals,... In other words, although perceived as intentionally created by human agents, the purpose of works of art is not clear, and cries out for an explanation."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Methinks the hot-war of <i>"explanation"</i> itself <i>"cries out"</i> for a ceasefire.
<p>
Here is a worthy "extrinsic" mandate for art and artists: to teach adult <i>"babies"</i> not to <i>"cr</i>[y] <i>out"</i> at the first whiff of something or someone they cannot <i>"manipulate."</i>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<i>"To clarify, let us contrast a tool with a work of art. A tool will be recognized as such if it carries out a specific function; and if this tool carries out this function, we directly infer that its maker intended it to do so. This tool, then, may be assessed without speculation regarding the maker’s intention; recognizing its function is sufficient to categorize it and use it. For a work of art, the contrary is true: as it carries out no obvious precise function, it cannot be assessed without speculation about the artist’s intention. In other words, a work of art would be assumed to communicate something, which would have to be inferred from the artist’s intention."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
[117]
<p align=justify>
<i>"On the basis of an art theory (Levinson, 1979, 1993), Bloom (1996)...proposed a new theory of artefact categorization, in which the decisive factor is claimed to be the intention of the artefact’s maker. According to this theory, an artefact actually is categorized as belonging to a kind X if, and only if, its maker intended it to belong to that kind (or, more precisely, if it is recognized that its maker intended it to belong to that kind). This does not mean, of course, that considerations of form and function play no role in artefact categorization; most of the time, form and function actually constitute good indicators of what the intention of the artefact’s maker was... More simply, it means that taking into account the intention of the artefact’s maker allows one to avoid some problems with classic approaches to artefact categorization. ...similarity of form and function are not sufficient for artefact categorization, because two objects may be dissimilar in form, but belong to the same kind, and two objects may be similar in potential function, but belong to different kinds. If one considers the intention of the artefact’s
maker, categorization appears to be less problematic: two things may be dissimilar in form, but made with the same intention (and therefore considered as belonging to the same kind), and two things may be similar in function, but made with different intentions (and therefore considered as belonging to different kinds).
<p align=justify>
"...experimental studies that support the idea that intention plays an important role in artefact categorization and appreciation. ...children were asked to draw objects similar in form, such as a balloon and a lollipop; after another task, they had to name their drawings. Given the age of the participants (3–4-year-old), the drawings were very simple, and so similar that it was impossible to distinguish them on the only basis of form. However, a
<p align=justify>
</i>[118]<i>
<p align=justify>
significant percentage of the participants named the drawings correctly, suggesting that children distinguished their creations by reference to what they intended to represent."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
...
<blockquote>
<i>"<b>Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of Communication</b>
<p align=justify>
Bloom’s (1996) theory of artefact categorization suggests that intention plays an important role in intuitive judgements about artefacts, especially when their form, function, or mode of production is ambiguous. From this point of view, works of art that our approach targets typically are ambiguous. Being human-made objects, works of art activate intuitive cognition for artefacts, but at the same time frustrate functional expectations associated with artefacts; the creator’s intended function for his or her creation cannot be simply
“read off” of the work of art. How, then, are works of art represented by
<p align=justify>
</i>[119]<i>
<p align=justify>
human minds? We suggest that they are considered as acts of non-verbal symbolic communication, in which case Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) Relevance Theory might be a useful theoretical framework to approach them.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
"According to Relevance Theory, to communicate is to make explicit an
intention (the intention to communicate, and the intention to communicate something in particular), and successful communication occurs when this intention is correctly inferred from the evidence, that is, from the utterance or behaviour in question. However, as most of the time a number of different inferences may be drawn from the evidence, communication is also constrained by the Principle of Relevance. According to the Principle of Relevance, communicating goes along with an expectation of relevance: people pay attention only to information which may have an effect in a given context or, in cognitive terms, to information which is “worth processing”. Furthermore, according to Sperber and Wilson, there are degrees of relevance, and these may be described in terms of a cost-benefit relationship: the most relevant propositions in a given discourse are those that (1) have the greatest cognitive impact in the context and (2) are the easiest to process. In Sperber and Wilson’s words, relevance is geared to “the processing of information which is likely to bring about the greatest contribution to the mind’s general cognitive goals at the smallest processing cost” (1995: 48).
<p align=justify>
"We propose to apply Relevance Theory to art appreciation. First of all, we suggest that works of art, much like utterances, are intuitively assessed as acts of symbolic communication: these particular artefacts, being intentionally created through human agency, but lacking ordinary functionality, would be thought to “mean something”. According to Relevance Theory, human communication carries an expectation of relevance; in our domain of interest, that would mean that works of art are expected to communicate something that is
relevant or, in other words, worth processing. Furthermore, according to Relevance Theory, successful communication occurs when the speaker’s intention is correctly inferred from the utterance. Understanding the artist’s intention would, thus, be a crucial factor in assessing the relevance of a work of art."</i>
</blockquote>
<p>
There's no elegant way to phrase this, but it has to be asked:
<p>
Why on Earth
<br>
would we think
<br>
that
<br>
<i>"the artist's intention"</i>
<br>
was
<br>
to <i>"communicate"</i>
<br>
their intention?
</p>
<p>
We seem ensnared here in a notably fraught commission of Rank's fallacy of "arguing back:"
<p style="margin-left: 4%">
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator. But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.
<p style="margin-left: 4%">
(<i>AnA</i>, p. 22)
</p>
<p>
i.e.
<br>
I am taking the Romantic and Modern construals of "the artist's intention" to be open-ended, at least from the artist's own standpoint. Conversely, the construal of "intention" that the audience or critic constructs around their reception of the work, conscientious and rigorous as that reception may be, is bounded. What is UN-bounded on the reception side is "interpretation," which is a closer analog to the artists' own act of inspiration simply because it itself is "inspired," usually to a fault; contemplator thus becomes creator, it is true, but merely the creator of a new intention rather than an astute diagnostician of the original one.
<p>
By "open-ended," I don't mean "infinite." What I mean is that so-called Conceptual Art and its laser-focused intentions of effect arrived on the scene as a self-conscious movement only in the mid-twentieth century. Like any such tendency, it must have existed from the beginning <i>as a mere tendency</i>, but the time was not yet ripe for a heroic phase of public acclaim, artist self-advocacy, and scholarly beard-scratching. Once that began to happen, we suddenly get much more explicit statements of tightly-bounded <i>"intention"</i> being made not just after- but also before-the-fact. By now this has been absorbed into the postmodern grab-bag, alongside the "open-ended" intention of certain Moderns and the non-intention of certain Experimentalists. But the above account (this is a strength, its ONLY strength that I can thus so far detect) seems to begin with the audience in a state of TOTAL ignorance as to the artist's "intention," up to and including what they are even supposed to do with themselves in the presence of the work. This is because <i>"a work of art...carries out no obvious precise function."</i> Ideally, yes! But even to a misanthrope like me, rendering the apprehension of intention thusly as an "ecological" rather than "aesthetic" question is...pretty weird. So, in that respect, I guess I've found the limits of my absolutism. But in another respect this "ecological" view is actually quite far from aesthetic absolutism, as we see in the next part: that such a work <i>"cannot be assessed without speculation about the artist’s intention."</i>
</p>
<br><br>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
[120]
<p align=justify>
<i>"Human products that appear to have required a lot of effort and skill to produce seem to be naturally admired by people. In the visual arts, it makes a difference to know that a painting was not achieved in one day, but that it required several months of hard work."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
[footnote to above:]
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<i>"Kruger et al. (2001, p. 91) argued that “[perceived] effort is used as a heuristic for quality”. In one study, two abstract paintings were considered better when they were thought to have required more time when created (Kruger et al., 2004, Experiment 2)."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
It's easy to imagine this, in another context, being labeled as a <b>cognitive bias</b>. Is this what "pragmatism" has come down to? Taking all of this as it comes? Accepting it as inevitable, evolutionarily hardwired, etc., and seeking to work "pragmatically" within these bounds? That is quite dispiriting.
<p>
This seems as good an example as any of a question of "art appreciation" which can be answered either in Elitist or in Populist terms depending on your already-held ideology: while it's simple enough to pull the pin on these Darwinist grenades and drop them everywhere, it's usually safe to assume, even with the most "universal" traits, that a small number of people don't conform to them. And so that's where you'll find your aesthetic "elite," i.e. those who are not merely imprisoned by their own implicit/revealed preferences but, rather, contrive ways of becoming aware of them and are willing to be skeptical of them. Actually, I suspect that ceasing to use <i>"effort...as a heuristic for quality"</i> is neither complicated nor onerous, not even for casuals. Upon being gently made aware, almost anyone can see that this serves all concerned very poorly. (Once again, Stone Age traits can be highly maladaptive in the postindustrial West.) The thing is, though, <b>some people don't need to be told</b>; meanwhile there are others who <b>you can't tell them anything.</b>
</p>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
[121]
<p align=justify>
<i>"From our point of view, the effort and skill that went into a work
of art do not only trigger respect and admiration. More importantly, they constitute indicators and clarifiers of intentionality."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Hard to argue with that on the broader level. On the more granular level it seems possible to problematize this version of <i>"intentionality."</i> Artists themselves, I think, would call this a question of "control," not one of intention. But sure, good looking people do better at job interviews than homely people; consumers will haggle over $1 when buying a potato but ignore $100 difference between cars; and audiences will find that Pollack and Rothko lack "intention."
</p>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
[122]
<p align=justify>
<i>"<b>Method</b>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
</i>[123]
<p align=justify>
"Measures
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[124]
<p align=justify>
<i>"A few pilot raters reported “embarrassment” with assessing the effort and skill that went into a work of art, and during the actual survey this was a general trend among visual arts specialists."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
This suggests that they actually learned something from their <i>"train</i>[ing]<i>"</i>!
</p>
<blockquote>
[132]
<p align=justify>
<i>"<b>Conclusion</b>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
</i>[133]<i>
<p align=justify>
... intentionalism in art appreciation – or the idea that considering the artist’s intention is necessary to understand and judge a work of art – has been criticized by art theorists (e.g., Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946/1999). We think however that understanding the artist’s intention is at the core of art appreciation, as far as one does not misread what we mean by this. For example, we do not pretend that all art is meaningful (what is the “meaning” of a Rothko’s multiform painting?), and many contemporary artists would deny that their works convey a precise “message” that would need to be “understood”. All we say is that works of art, because they cannot be approached in terms of practical use or function, will be automatically assessed as acts of symbolic communication and, therefore, will trigger speculations about the artist’s intention (“Why did he or she make that?”) – whether speculating about the artist’s intention is justified or not, and whether the artist actually intended to communicate something or not."</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
[see "mixed results for replications of kruger et al", online]
</p>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<br><br>
=-=-=-=MOREZ=-=-=-=
<br><br>
<hr><hr>
<h5>***b+a***</h5>
Mark Reybrouck
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257780016_Musical_Sense-Making_and_the_Concept_of_Affordance_An_Ecosemiotic_and_Experiential_Approach">"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"</a><br>
(2012)
<i>"Semiosis, in Peirce’s view, entails a ‘triadic’ relation between a sign (sign vehicle or representamen), an object and an interpretant, each of them being relationally interconnected...
"This triadic sign function can be easily applied to music. Sounds, in this view, are not considered as objects (firstness) but as signs (secondness) that refer to something that has caused them and that can be interpreted by music users (thirdness)."</i>
...
<i>"It is possible, finally, to bring together productive and experiential aspects of musical affordances as exemplified in the huge body of action and perception studies... Music, in this view, is something that induces a kind of (ideo)motor resonance that prompts the listener to experience the sounds as if he/she is involved in their production (Reybrouck, 2001b). This is a claim which is somewhat analogous to the central version of the motor theory of perception, which means that motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system. As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions..."</i>
Emilio Ribes-Iñesta<br><a href="http://behavior.org/resources/123.pdf">WHAT IS DEFINED IN OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS? THE CASE OF OPERANT PSYCHOLOGY</a><br>
(2003)
<i>"Skinner’s early reading of Bacon seemed to shape in him a strong technological attitude towards knowledge. Smith (1992) <i>[</i>"On prediction and control. B.F. Skinner and the technological ideal of science"<i>]</i> examined this influence of Bacon on Skinner:
</i>
"
Bacon’s (1620/1960) epochal declaration that “human knowledge and human power meet in one” (p. 39)—one of the Baconian principles that Skinner (1983) said governed his own life—is not a mere claim that contemplative knowledge can be put to human uses; rather it is the declaration of a different kind of knowing, in which the power of producing effects is not simply the by-product of knowledge, but rather the criterion of its soundness. With this declaration, the
[117]
age-old distinction of fact and artifact is broken down, and the artificial assumes, in a sense, more value than the natural. . .artifacts are preferred as being specially revealing of nature’s ways. (p. 217)
"
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***lasch lippman***</h5>
Hasok Chang
<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/">"Operationalism"</a>
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2021 Edition)
<i>"Maila Walter observes (1990, 192–193): “Within the community of scientists and scientific philosophers, Bridgman had become the lone spokesman for a radical existential subjectivism”, more akin to Rheinhold Niebuhr’s existentialist theology than to any commonly recognized philosophy of science."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr><hr>
-->Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-30443232925090879822024-03-10T08:41:00.000-07:002024-03-10T08:41:13.864-07:00Sennett—The Craftsman (iv)<br>
<p>
Richard Sennett
<br>
<i>The Craftsman</i>
<br>
(2008)
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[246]
<br><br>
<font size=4>
Expertise
</font>
<br>
<i>The Sociable and the Antisocial Expert</i>
<p align=justify>
The danger to others posed by people driven by excellence crystallizes in the figure of the expert. He or she appears in two guises, sociable or antisocial. A well-crafted institution will favor the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is
in trouble.
<p align=justify>
The expert's provenance and prestige are ancient, beginning with the civic honor of the demioergoi. The expert has since the Middle Ages figured as a master craftsman who is perforce a sociable expert. The civic and religious rituals that organized the guilds forged a social bond in which it was the master's duty to participate; the internal organization of each workshop, based on face-to-face authority and exercised within a small community, further cemented sociability. Closer to modern times, the amateur gradually lost ground, especially with the dawn of the Industrial Age—the amateur's foraging curiosity seeming of lesser value than specialized knowledge.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
This is already getting too loose. "Amateur" or "professional" is one distinction, expert or novice is another, specialst or generalist is yet a third.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Yet the modern expert has few strong rituals to bind him or her to the larger community or indeed to colleagues.
<p align=justify>
So argues the sociologist Elliott Krause in <i>The Death of the Guilds</i>. His studies of engineers, lawyers, physicians, and academics show how the power of professional associations weakened in the last century under the pressures of an impersonal market and bureaucratic state even as the professions themselves became stricter, more expert disciplines. National or international professional organizations are of course far larger than were the urban guilds of the past, but their meetings have had, Krause believes, some of the same bonding, ritual character. The first modern usage of the term professional referred to people who saw themselves as something other than just employees. On balance, government and legal regulation has done more to constrict the professions than did the market; the law bureaucratized the
<p align=justify>
[247]
<p align=justify>
very content of what professionals know. What went missing was community—a point also and first made by Robert Perrucci and Joel Gerst in their pioneering study <i>Profession without Community</i>.
<p align=justify>
The scholarly study of expertise has gone through three phases. At first, "the expert" was studied as a person who had developed analytic powers that could be applied to any field; a consultant roaming from corporate turf to turf figures as such an expert. Analysts of expertise then "discovered" that content mattered; the expert had to know a great deal about something in particular (the ten-thousand-hour rule derived from this discovery). Today, both concerns combine with the social explorations made by Perrucci, Gerstl, and Krause to frame a problem: How can an expert act sociably if he or she lacks a strong professional community, a strong guild? Can good work itself turn the expert outward?
<p align=justify>
Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elabodated in long-term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well yeah, but how would we know if that's really what's going on in the above study?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Craft experience of imperfect tools has also found its way into the
<p align=justify>
[248]
<p align=justify>
understanding of sociable expertise. These tools obliged their users, as we have seen among seventeenth-century scientists, to be minded to fixing as well as making; repair is a fundamental category of craftsmanship; today again, an expert is seen as someone who can equally make and repair. We may recall the sociologist Douglas Harper's words: an expert is someone "with knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence . . . It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<i>"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean..."</i>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In Harper's study of small machine shops, the sociable experts tend to be good at explaining and giving advice to their customers. The sociable expert, that is, is comfortable with mentoring, the modern echo of
medieval in loco parentis.
<p align=justify>
Finally, the sociable side of expertise addresses the issue of knowledge transfer posed in Stradivari's workshop. He could not pass on his experience, which had been become his own tacit knowledge. Too many modern experts imagine themselves in the Stradivari trap—indeed, we could call Stradivari Syndrome the conviction that one's expertise is ineffable.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well, this also depends on how disciplinary boundaries are drawn. If your own practice of medicine is not recognized as "medicine" by all the other doctors, you are going to have a hard time
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
pass</mark>ing it
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
on
</mark>
by way of the existing mechanisms for doing so.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Since one's
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
experience</mark>s
are, dare I say,
precisely
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ineffable
</mark>
vis-a-vis everyone else (didn't we <i>just</i> take a whole junket through this idea, complete with visits <i>chez</i> Smith and Hume?), one must believe the discipline in question to be wholly self-contained in precisely the way these passages argue against. Otherwise there is no way to believe that expertise can ever be fully communicated.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This syndrome appears among British doctors who have failed to discuss treatment options, to expose themselves to criticism, to unpack their tacit understandings with colleagues. As a result, their skills degrade over time in comparison with doctors who turn outward professionally. Local family doctors—those reassuring figures in medical romance—seem particularly to suffer from Stradivari Syndrome.
<p align=justify>
The GoodWork Project at Harvard University, led by Howard Gardner, has investigated various ways to surmount the problem of hoarding expertise. Researchers in the GoodWork Project have studied, for instance, a famous breakdown in standards at the New York Times at a moment when a few reporters became spectacularly corrupt. In the GoodWork Project's view, the fault lay with the institution. "We are the <i>New York Times</i>," ineffable, the Stradivari of news organizations. As a result, the paper didn't communicate its standards explicitly; this si-
<p align=justify>
[249]
<p align=justify>
lence opened a gap for unscrupulous reporters to colonize the organization.
<p align=justify>
To Gardner, transparency can counter this danger, but transparency of a certain sort: the standards of good work must be clear to people who are not themselves experts. For Gardner and his colleagues, the effort to devise such a language jolts experts into working better as well as more honestly. Matthew Gill makes a similar analysis of accounting practices in London:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the standard that makes sense to nonexperts
</mark>
—
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
rather than self-referential rules and regulations
</mark>
—
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
is what keeps accountants honest
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
So, not all reporters are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
scrupulous
</mark>
and not all accountants are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
honest
</mark>
. But it's not their fault. No one <i>told</i> them not to lie, at least not
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
explicitly
</mark>
, not during their long years of schooling and not even when they were hired. The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
rules and regulations
</mark>
they <i>did</i> learn about were merely
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
self-referential
</mark>
. So who are <i>you</i> to judge them? If that's all <i>you</i> had to go on, <i>you'd</i> probably lie too.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
But, if you are a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
nonexpert
</mark>
, then you <i>do</i> know what honesty is, unlike the experts, who have to be told. Your intuitive understanding of honesty
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
refer</mark>s
to all sorts of real-people stuff, unlike the experts who forget everything else they've ever known or experienced as soon as they start learning about expert stuff. And that's just how it is.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
We can't select for qualities like honesty and scrupulousness in new generations of reporters and accountants, though we'll surely be selecting for all kinds of other, more specific qualities and skills. We can't count on honesty from these carefully selected experts, but we <i>can</i> count on any and all
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
nonexperts
</mark>
to know what is honest and what is not. Honesty is a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
standard that makes sense to nonexperts
</mark>
. All we have to do is ask them.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Turning outward, they hold themselves to account and can also see what the work means to others."
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Standards comprehensible to nonexperts raise quality in the organization as a whole.
</mark>
Sociable expertise doesn't create community in any self-conscious or ideological sense; it consists simply of good practices. The well-crafted organization will focus on whole human beings in time, it will encourage mentoring, and it will demand standards framed in language that any person in the organization might understand.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<i>"Don't f*ing lie"</i> seems like it would be very understandable. But it cannot possibly be specific enough. We have to be much more specific than this. But if we are <i>too</i> specific, we lapse into
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
self-referential</mark>ity. Good luck everybody.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<br><br><br>
<!--
<p>
<br>
<center>
% % %
</center>
<br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
Antisocial expertise has a more complicated side. There is an inherent inequality of knowledge and skill between expert and nonexpert. Antisocial expertise emphasizes the sheer fact of invidious comparison. One obvious consequence of emphasizing inequality is the humiliation and resentment this expert can arouse in others; a more subtle consequence is to make the expert himself or herself feel embattled.
<br><br>
The baking industry in Boston has shown both aspects of invidious comparison. In the 1970s Boston bakeries operated in ways a medieval goldsmith could make sense of; the craft of baking was directed face-to-face by masters who passed on their skills to apprentices. By the year 2000, automation had taken the place of master bakers on site. When the programmers and managers of the machines did appear in the Workshops, relations between the experts and "the boys" were tense. The experts spoke about the machines and gave directions that empha-
-->
<p align=justify>
[265] In old English a "career" meant a well-laid road, whereas a "job" meant simply a lump of coal or pile of wood that could be moved around at will. The medieval goldsmith within a guild exemplified the roadway of "career" in work. His life path was well laid in time, the stages of his progress were clearly marked, even if the work itself was inexact. His was a linear story. As appeared in Chapter I, the "skills society" is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well. Craftsmanship seems particularly vulnerable to this possibility, since craftsmanship is based on slow learning and on habit. His form of obsession—Len Greenham's—no longer seems to pay.
<br><br>
I'm not convinced that this is the craftsman's fated end. Schools
<br><br>
[266]
<br><br>
and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a
plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers often don't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the <i>Animal laborans</i> of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve.
<br><br>
<!--
Most people want to believe that their lives add up to more than a
random series of disconnected events.25 The well-crafted institution
wants to respond to this desire, once it decides that loyalty matters.
Workers who have been retrained by an institution are much more
bonded to it than are in-and-out workers. Loyalty especially matters to
a business when the business cycle turns down; workers will stay the
course, work longer hours, even take pay cuts rather than desert.
Strengthening skills is neither an individual nor a collective panacea.
In the modern economy, dislocation is a permanent fact. But figuring
out how to build on existing skills--to expand them or use them as à
base for acquiring other skills- is a strategy that helps orient individ-
uals in time. The well-crafted organization will want to pursue this
strategy to keep itself together.
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
My note says:
<br>
p. 266—"artisinal craftsman" as "promising subjects" for "job retraining"
<br>
Connects to J. Jacobs' riff on entrepreneurs and artists. The artist actually has formed an <u>identity</u> around their work; <u>not</u> around their "craftsmanship" generically, which is the ground for retraining. Retraining in such cases in untenable because it threatens dissolution of the self. For <u>many</u> reasons of course it would be better, or so it often seems, if such artsy-fartsies could just Get Over Themselves. I would certainly like to be able to say I've achieved this. But also, I wonder if there are not, variously, unintended consequences, negative externalities, dark continents, etc., etc., lurking behind every corner therein.
<blockquote>
[268]
<br><br>
<font size=4>
<b>
Ability
</b>
</font>
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
I've kept for the end of this book its most controversial proposal: that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman. The proposal is controversial because modern society sorts people along a
strict gradient of ability. The better you are at something, the fewer of you there are. This view has been applied not only to innate intelligence but to the subsequent development of abilities: the further you get, the fewer of you there are.
<p align=justify>
Craftsmanship doesn't fit into this framework. As will appear in this chapter, the rhythm of routine in craftsmanship draws on childhood experience of play, and almost all children can play well. The dialogue with materials in craftsmanship is unlikely to be charted by intelligence tests; again, most people are able to reason well about their physical sensations. Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts like specifying facts and then questioning them.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Now:
<br>
Nothing to disagree with here, only to add: there's a reason we distinguish between "art" and "craft." (Or is "specifying facts and then questioning them" a variable personality trait rather than a "simple mental act"?)
<br><br>
My note says:
<br>
p. 268—"...nearly anyone can become a good craftsman... Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts."
<br>
Perhaps this begins to flesh out the Goodmans' Divided Economy proposal: the subsistence economy is an economy of craftspeople, whereas the luxury economy is an economy of unevenly distributed merit. This works well both practically and ontologically, which is unusual.
<br>
A complication: could some of us actually be <u>incapable</u> of "simple" mental acts, not out of a deficit of intelligence but rather a <u>surplus</u>?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[290] I recognize that the reader may balk at thinking of experience in terms of technique. But who we are arises directly from what our bodies can do. Social consequences are built into the structure and the functioning of the human body, as in the workings of the human hand. I argue no more and no less than that the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations. And if debatable, this viewpoint is not uniquely mine. One hallmark of the pragmatist movement has been to suppose a continuum between the organic and the social. Whereas some sociobiologists have argued that genetics dictates behavior, pragmatists like Hans Joas maintain that the body's own richness furnishes the materials for a wide variety of creative action. Craftsmanship shows the continuum between the organic and the social put in action.
<p align=justify>
An eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage—the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some of the mystery by showing how intuitive leaps happen, in the reflections people make on the actions of their own hands or in the use of tools. I have sought to draw craft and art together, because all techniques contain expressive implications. This is true of making a pot; it is also and equally true of raising a child.
<br><br>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
But...the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expressive implications
</mark>
are vastly different between pot and child!
<br><br>
My note says:
<br>
p. 290—"...the word <i>creativity</i> appears in this book as little as possible..."
<br>
The reasons given are fair enough in and of themselves, but no doubt they are <u>quite incomplete</u>. He could have just pointed out that "creativity" is nothing more than the <u>agglomeration</u> of many smaller acts; mostly <u>craft</u>-acts which, as he says, <u>almost anyone</u> can do. But <u>almost no one</u> can <u>Agglomerate</u>, even though the units of Agglomeration are usually comically simple. <u>Something Else</u> is at work here! Namely scope and scale. (Speed seems inessential but does come in handy, e.g. for "improvisors.") None of those are Craft values, and in some ways they are actually craft-opposing values.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Now:
<br>
Sometime soon I'll post some excerpts from Sacks, <i>Musicophilia</i>. There is a wonderful "both sides" moment where he concludes that "a sizeable minority, perhaps thirty percent" of adults have the ability to be "creative." That's a whole lot of people but not everybody/anybody.
</p>
<!--
<blockquote>
I recognize also that the least developed side of my argument concerns politics—Arendt's domain, the domain of "statecraft." Modern pragmatism could be said to take on faith Jefferson's belief that learning to work well is the foundation of citizenship. Perhaps this Enlightenment faith remains compelling because it bridges the social and political realms, whereas Arendt, drawing on a long tradition of political thought stretching back to Machiavelli, believed that statecraft
Was a self-standing domain of expertise. The connection between work and citizenship may imply socialism, but not necessarily democracy; as appeared in the medieval guild, whose workshops served Ruskin,
</blockquote>
-->
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-83449726990559126172024-03-09T10:05:00.000-08:002024-03-09T10:05:58.349-08:00Sennett—The Craftsman (iii)<br>
<p>
Richard Sennett
<br>
<i>The Craftsman</i>
<br>
(2008)
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<!--
Gmail kac attac <kacattac@gmail.com>
Sennett craftsman #2
kac attac <kacattac@gmail.com> Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 6:23 PM
To: Stefan Kac <stefankac@yahoo.com>
-->
<blockquote>
[149]
<br><br>
CHAPTER 5
<br><br>
<font size=4>
The Hand
</font>
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the connection.
<p align=justify>
Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. ...
<!--
Of all the human limbs, the hands make the most varied movements, movements that can be controlled at will. Science has sought to show how these motions, plus the hand's varied ways of gripping and the sense of touch, affect how we think. That link between hand and head I will explore among three sorts of craftsmen whose hands become highly trained: musicians, cooks, and glassblowers. Advanced hand technique of their sort is a specialized human condition but has implications for more ordinary experience.
-->
<br><br><br>
<!--
<b>
<font size=4>
The Intelligent Hand
</font>
<br>
How the Hand Became Human
</b>
<br>
<i>Grip and Touch</i>
<br><br>
The image of "the intelligent hand" appeared in the sciences as early as 1833 when, a generation before Darwin, Charles Bell published
<br><br>
[150]
<br><br>
<i>The Hand</i>. Bell, a devout Christian, believed the hand came from God the Creator perfectly designed, a fit-for-purpose limb like all of his works. Bell accorded the hand a privileged place in creation, using various experiments to argue that the brain receives more trustworthy information from the touch of the hand than from images in the eye—the latter so often yielding false, misleading appearances. Darwin dethroned Bell's belief that the hand was timeless in form and function. In evolution, Darwin surmised, the brains of apes became larger as their arms and hands were used for other purposes than steadying the moving body. With greater brain capacity, our human ancestors learned how to hold things in their hands, to think about what they
held, and eventually to shape the things held; man-apes could make tools, humans make culture.
<br><br>
Until recently, evolutionists thought that it is the uses of the hand, rather than changes in its structure, that have matched the increasing size of the brain. Thus a half-century ago Frederick Wood Jones wrote, "It is not the hand that is perfect, but the whole nervous mechanism by which movements of the hand are evoked, coordinated, and controlled" which has enabled <i>Homo sapiens</i> to develop. Today we know that, in the near history of our species, the physical structure of the hand has itself evolved. The modern philosopher and medical doctor Raymond Tallis
explains part of the change by contrasting chimpanzee and human freedom to move the thumb at the trapezio-metacarpal joint: "As in chimpanzees, the joint is composed of interlocking concave and convex surfaces which form a saddle. The difference between ourselves and chimpanzees is that the saddle interlocks more in chimpanzees, and this restricts movement; in particular, it prevents opposition of the thumb to the other fingers." Research by John Napier and others has shown how,
in the evolution of <i>Homo sapiens</i>, the physical opposition between thumb and fingers has become ever more articulate; the opposition of thumb to other digits has combined with subtle changes occurring in the bones that support and strengthen the index finger.
-->
<p align=justify>
[151]
<p align=justify>
<!--
Such structural changes have allowed our species a distinctive physical experience of grip. Grips are voluntary actions; to grip is a decision, in contrast to involuntary motions like the blinking of the eyelids. The ethnologist Mary Marzke has usefully sorted out three basic ways we grip things. First, we can pinch small objects between the tip of the thumb and the side of the index finger. Second, we can cradle an object in the palm and then move it around with pushing and
massaging actions between thumb and fingers. (Though advanced primates can perform these two grips, they cannot perform them as well as we can.) Third is the cupping grip—as when a ball or other biggish object is held by the rounded hand, thumb and index finger placed opposite the object—and is even more developed in our species. The cupping grip allows us to hold an object securely in one hand while we work on it with the other hand.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
Once an animal like ourselves can grip well in these three ways, cultural evolution takes over. Marzke dates <i>Homo faber</i>'s first appearance on earth to the moment when, as it were, someone could grip things securely in order to work them over:
-->
"Most of the unique features of the modern human hand, including the thumb, can be related to . . . the stresses that would have been incurred with the use of these grips in the manipulation of stone tools." Thinking then ensues about the nature of what one holds. American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.
<p align=justify>
There is, however, a problem about grips, especially important to people who develop an advanced hand technique. This is how to let go. In music, for instance, one can play rapidly and cleanly only by learning how to come off a piano key or how to release the finger on a string or on a valve. In the same way, mentally, we need to let go of a problem, usually temporarily, in order to see better what it's about, then take hold of it afresh. Neuropsychologists now believe that the physical and cognitive capacity to release underlies the ability of people to let go of a
<p align=justify>
[152]
<p align=justify>
fear or an obsession. Release is also full of ethical implication, as when
we surrender control—our grip—over others.
<p align=justify>
One of the myths that surround technique is that people who develop it to a high level must have unusual bodies to begin with. As concerns the hand, this is not quite true.
</blockquote>
<p>
I suspect it <i>is</i> true of the lip and the teeth.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
For instance, the ability to move one's fingers very rapidly is lodged in all human bodies, in the pyramidal tract in the brain. All hands can be stretched out through training so that the thumb forms a right angle to the first finger. A necessity for cellists, pianists with small hands can likewise develop ways to overcome this limit. Other demanding physical activities like surgery do not require special hands to begin with—Darwin long ago observed that physical endowment is a starting point, not an end, in any organism's behavior. This is certainly true of human hand technique.
Grips develop in individuals just as they have developed in our species.
<p align=justify>
<center>
* * *
</center>
<p align=justify>
Touch poses different issues about the intelligent hand. In the history of medicine, as in philosophy, there has been a long-standing debate about whether touch furnishes the brain a different kind of sensate information than the eye. It has seemed that touch delivers invasive,
"unbounded" data, whereas the eye supplies images that are contained in a frame. If you touch a hot stove, your whole body goes into sudden trauma, whereas a painful sight can be instantly diminished by shutting your eyes. A century ago, the biologist Charles Sherrington reformatted this discussion. He explored what he called "active touch," which names the conscious intent guiding the fingertip; touch appeared to him proactive as well as reactive.
<p align=justify>
A century on, Sherrington's research has taken a further turn. The fingers can engage in proactive, probing touch without conscious intent, as when the fingers search for some particular spot on an object that stimulates the brain to start thinking; this is called "localized"
<p align=justify>
[153]
<p align=justify>
touch. ...
<!--
We've already seen an instance of it, for this is how the medieval goldsmith made an assay; his judgments were made by the fingertips rolling and pressing the metallic "earth" until a particular spot that seemed impure was found. From this localized sensate evidence, the goldsmith reasoned backward to the nature of the material.
-->
<p align=justify>
The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs. ...
<!--
By protecting the nerve endings in the hand, the callus makes the act of probing less hesitant. Although the physiology of this process is not yet well understood, the result is: the callus both sensitizes the hand to minute physical spaces and stimulates the sensation at the fingertips. We could imagine the callus doing the same thing for the hand as the zoom lens does for the camera.
-->
<p align=justify>
About the hand's animal powers, Charles Bell believed that different sense limbs or organs had separate neural channels to the brain and thus that the senses could be isolated from one another. Today's neural science shows his belief to be false; instead, a neural network of eye-brain-hand allows touching, gripping, and seeing to work in concert. Stored information about holding a ball, for instance, helps the brain make sense of a two-dimensional photograph of a ball...
<!--
: the curve of the hand and the hand's sense of the ball's weight help the brain think in three dimensions, seeing a flat object on paper in the round.
-->
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
<b>
Prehension
</b>
<br>
<i>To Grasp Something</i>
<p align=justify>
To say that we "grasp something" implies physically that we reach for it. In the familiar physical gesture of grasping a glass, the hand will assume a rounded shape, suitable for cupping the glass, before it actually touches the surface. The body is ready to hold before it knows
<p align=justify>
[154]
<p align=justify>
whether what it will hold is freezing cold or boiling hot. The technical name for movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data is <i>prehension</i>.
<p align=justify>
Mentally, we "grasp something" when we understand the concept, say, of an equation like <i>a</i> / <i>d</i> = <i>b</i> + <i>c</i> rather than simply perform the operations. Prehension gives a particular cast to mental understanding as well as physical action: you don't wait to think until all information is in hand, you anticipate the meaning. Prehension signals alertness, engagement, and risk-taking all in the act of looking ahead; it is in spirit the very opposite of the prudent accountant who does not exert a mental muscle until he or she has all the numbers.
<p align=justify>
<!--
Human newborns begin to practice prehension as early as their second week by reaching for baubles held in front of them. Since the eye and the hand act in concert, prehension increases when the baby can hold up its head; with the neck more under control, an infant can better see what it is reaching for. In the first five months of life, the baby's arm develops the neuromuscular capacity to move independently toward what the eye sees. In the next five months, the baby's hand develops the neuromuscular capacity to shape itself into different grasping positions. Both skills are tied to the development of the pyramidal tract in the brain, a pathway between the primary motor region of the cortex and the spinal cord. By the end of the first year, in Frank Wilson's words, "the hand is ready for a lifetime of physical exploration."
<br><br>
The verbal results of prehension are illustrated by an experiment the philosopher Thomas Hobbes conducted in tutoring the young childen of the Cavendish family. Hobbes sent the young Cavendishes into a darkened room into which he'd placed all sorts of unfamiliar objects. After they'd groped about, he asked them to leave the room and describe to him what they "saw" with their hands. He noted that the children used sharper, more precise language than the words they used when they could see in a lit space. He explained this in part as a matter of them "grasping for sense" in the dark, a stimulus that served them
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[155]
<br><br>
to speak well later, in the light, when the immediate sensations had "decayed."
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Reaching for something, in the prehensive way, establishes facts on the ground. For instance, when a conductor gives directive hand gestures a moment ahead of the sound. If the hand gesture for a downbeat came exactly in time, the conductor would not be leading, since the sound would already have happened. Batsmen in cricket get the same advice: "get ahead of the swing." Beryl Markham's remarkable memoir <i>West with the Night</i> provides yet another example. In the days when pilots lacked much guidance from instruments, she flew through the African night by imagining that she had already made the lift or turn she was about to make. All these technical feats are based on
what anyone does in reaching for a glass.
</blockquote>
Really?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Raymond Tallis has given the fullest account we now have of prehension. He organizes this phenomenon into four dimensions: anticipation, of the sort that shapes the hand reaching for the glass; contact, when the brain acquires sense data through touch; language cognition, in naming what one holds; and last, reflection on what one has done. Tallis does not insist that these must add up to self-consciousness. One's orientation can remain focused on the object; what the hand
knows is what the hand does. To Tallis's four I'll add a fifth element:
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the values developed by highly skilled hands.
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<font size=4>
<b>
Hand Virtues
</b>
</font>
<b>
<br>
At the Fingertip
<br>
</b>
<i>Truthfulness</i>
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In learning to play a string instrument, young children do not know at first where to place their fingers on the fingerboard to produce an accurate pitch. The Suzuki method, named after the Japanese music educator Suzuki Shin'ichi, solves this problem instantly by taping thin plastic strips onto the fingerboard. ...
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The child violinist places a finger on
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[156]
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a color strip to sound a note perfectly in tune. This method emphasizes beauty of tone, which Suzuki called "tonalization," from the start, without focusing on the complexities of producing a beautiful tone. The hand motion is determined by a fixed destination for the fingertip.
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...
<p align=justify>
This user-friendly method inspires instant confidence. ...
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By the fourth lesson, a child can become a virtuoso of the nursery tune "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." And the Suzuki method breeds a sociable confidence; an entire orchestra of seven-year-olds can belt out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" because the hand of each knows exactly what to do.
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These happy certainties erode, however, the moment the strips are removed.
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In principle, habit should have ingrained accuracy. ...
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One might imagine that the fingers would simply go down on the unmarked fingerboard exactly where the tape had been.
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In fact, habit of this mechanical sort fails—and for a physical reason. The Suzuki method has stretched small hands laterally at the knuckle ridge but has not sensitized the fingertip that actually presses down on the string. Because the fingertip doesn't know the fingerboard, sour notes appear as soon as the tapes come off. As in love, so in technique; innocent confidence is weak. ...
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A further complication ensues if the player looks at the fingerboard, trying to see where the fingertip should go. The eye will find no answer on this smooth, black surface. Thus, a child orchestra when first untaped
sounds like a howling mob.
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Here is a problem of false security. The musical child's problem recalls Victor Weisskopf's caution to adult scientific technicians that "the computer understands the answer but I don't think you understand the answer." Another adult analogy to taping would be the grammar-
check" functions of word-processing programs; these give the button-pusher no insight into why one grammatical construction is preferable to others.
-->
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Suzuki well understood the problem of false security. He counseled removing the tapes as soon as the child feels the pleasure of
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making music.
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A self-taught musician (his interest in the late 1940s began when he heard a recording by Mischa Elman of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria"),
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...Suzuki knew from his experiments that truthfulness lies at the fingertips: touch is the arbiter of tone. ...
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There is a parallel here also to the goldsmith's assay, the slow, probing touch of materials at the fingertips that eschewed instant, false security.
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<p align=justify>
We want to know what sort of truth is this, which casts off false security.
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In music, the ear works in concert with the fingertip to probe. Put rather dryly, the musician touches the string in different ways, hears a variety of effects, then searches for the means to repeat and reproduce the tone he or she wants. In reality, this can be a difficult and agonizing
struggle to answer the questions "What exactly did I do? How can I do it again?"
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Instead of the fingertip acting as a mere servant, this kind of touching moves backward from sensation to procedure. The principle here is reasoning backward from consequence to cause.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--What follows for someone acting on this principle? Imagine an untaped boy struggling to play in tune. He seems to get one note exactly right, but then the ear tells him that the next note he plays in that position sounds sour. There's a physical reason for this trouble: in all stringed instruments, when the pressed string becomes shorter in length, the width between the fingers must also diminish; feedback from the ear sends the signal that lateral adjustment is needed at the
knuckle ridge (a famous exercise in Jean-Pierre Duport's <i>Études</i> explores the interplay between diminishing lateral width and maintaining the rounded hand as the cellist moves across all strings for their entire two-foot length). Through trial and error the untaped neophyte might
learn how to contract at the ridge, yet still no solution will be in sight. He may have held his hand at a right angle to the fingerboard. Perhaps how he should try sloping the palm to one side, up toward the pegs; this helps. He can produce an accurate sound because the slope equalizes
the relations between the first and second fingers, which are unequal
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<!--
in length. (Moreover, a perfectly right-angle address to the string strains the second, longer finger.) But this new position makes a hash of the lateral ridge problem he thought he had solved. And on it goes. Every new issue of playing in tune causes him to rethink solutions arrived at before.
-->
<p align=justify>
What could motivate a child to pursue such a demanding path? One school of psychology says that the motivation is lodged in an experience fundamental to all human development: the primal event of separation can teach the young human to become curious. This research is associated with, in the mid-twentieth century, D. W. Winnicott and John Bowlby,...
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psychologists interested in humans' earliest experiences of attachment and separation, beginning with the infant's disconnection from its mother's breast. In pop-psychology, the loss of that connection begets anxiety and mourning; the British psychologists sought to show just why it is a much richer event.
<br><br>
Winnicott posited that once no longer one with the maternal body, the infant is newly stimulated, directed outward. Bowlby went into the nursery to study the difference separation makes in the ways young children touch, weigh, and turn around inanimate objects. He observed with care daily activities that before him had been taken to be of little consequence. For us, one aspect of this research is particularly valuable.
-->
<p align=justify>
Both psychologists emphasized the energies children come to invest in "transitional objects"—technical jargon for the human capacity to care about those people or material things that themselves change. As psychotherapists, this school of psychologists sought to aid adult patients who seemed fixated in infantile traumas of security to dwell more easily in the realm of shifting human relationships. But the idea of the "transitional object" more largely names what can truly engage curiosity:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an uncertain or unstable experience.
</mark>
Still, the child submitting to the uncertainties of tone production, or indeed any highly demanding hand activity, is a special case: he or she seems confronted by
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[159]
<p align=justify>
what might seem an unending, mushy process yielding only provisional solutions that give the musician no sense of increasing control and no emotional experience of security.
<p align=justify>
Matters don't quite become so dire because the musician has an objective standard to meet: playing in tune.
<!--
Like the policy wonks described in Chapter 1,
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...it might be argued that high levels of technical skill can be reached only by people with fixed objective standards of truth.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well, there are "personal" standards, "subjective" in the ultimate sense yet "objective" in context of the practice, which can fix the goalposts for self-directed artists. But we do have to "project" these "objectively" rather than just dreaming about them.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Musically we need simply observe that <i>believing</i> in correctness drives technical improvement; curiosity about transitional objects evolves into definitions of what they should be. The quality of sound is such a standard of correctness—even for Suzuki. ...
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This is why he begins with tonalization. The belief in and search for correctness in technique breeds expression. In music, this passage occurs when standards modulate from physical events like playing with a good tone to more aesthetic measures of, for instance, a well-shaped phrase.
-->
Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions.
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Both composers and performers are said to hear with the "inner ear," but that immaterial metaphor is misleading...
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—famously for composers like Arnold Schoenberg, shocked by the actual sounds of what
they've written on the page, equally for the performer whose study of scores is necessary but not sufficient preparation for putting bow to string or lips to reed.
-->
<i>[Rather]</i> The sound itself is the moment of truth.
<p align=justify>
This is therefore also the moment when error becomes clear to the musician. As a performer, at my fingertips I experience error—error that I will seek to correct. I have a standard for what should be, but my truthfulness resides in the simple recognition that I make mistakes. Sometimes in discussions of science this recognition is reduced to the cliché of "learning from one's mistakes." Musical technique shows that
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[160]
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the matter is not so simple. I have to be willing to commit error, to play wrong notes, in order eventually to get them right. This is the commitment to truthfulness that the young musician makes by removing the Suzuki tapes.
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In making music, the backward relationship between fingertip and palm has a curious consequence: it provides a solid foundation for developing physical security. Practicing that attends to momentary error at the fingertips actually increases confidence: once the musician can do something correctly more than once, he or she is no longer terrorized by that error. In turn, by making something happen more than once, we have an object to ponder;
</blockquote>
<p>
LeRoi Jones eat your heart out.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
variations in that conjuring act permit exploration of sameness and difference; practicing becomes a narrative
</blockquote>
<p>
Ugh...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
rather than mere digital repetition; hard-won movements become ever more deeply ingrained in the body; the player inches forward to greater skill. In the taped state, by contrast, musical practice becomes boring, the same thing repeated over and over. Here handwork, not surprisingly, tends to degrade.
<p align=justify>
Diminishing the fear of making mistakes is all-important in our art, since the musician on stage can't stop, paralyzed, if she or he makes a mistake. In performance, the confidence to recover from error is not a personality trait; it is a learned skill. Technique develops, then, by a dialectic between the correct way to do something and the willingness to experiment through error. The two sides cannot be separated. If the young musician is simply given the correct way, he or she will suffer from a false sense of security. If the budding musician luxuriates in curiosity, simply going with the flow of the transitional object, she or he will never improve.
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<center>
* * *
</center>
<p align=justify>
This dialogue addresses one of the shibboleths in craftsmanship, the employment of "fit-for-purpose" procedures or tools. Fit-for-purpose seeks to eliminate all procedures that do not serve a predeter-
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[161]
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mined end. The idea was embodied in Diderot's plates of L'Anglée, which showed no litter or wasted paper; programmers now speak of systems without "hiccups"; the Suzuki tape is a fit-for-purpose contrivance. We should think of fit-for-purpose as an achievement rather than a starting point. To arrive at that goal, the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, in technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.
</blockquote>
<p>
As good a rejoinder as any to the fear of "practicing your mistakes."
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Fit-for-purpose action sets the context for prehension. Prehension seems to prepare the hand to be fit and ready, but this is an incomplete story. In making music we certainly prepare yet cannot recoil when our hand does not then fit its aim or purpose; to correct, we have to be willing—more, to desire—to dwell in error a bit longer in order to understand fully what was wrong about the initial preparation. The full scenario of practice sessions that improve skill is thus: prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form. In this narrative,
</blockquote>
<p>
For Christ's sake Dick, does it <i> really</i> just <i>have</i> to be a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
narrative?
</mark>
</p>
<blockquote>
fit-for-purpose is achieved rather than preconceived.
<br><br><br>
<font size=4>
<b>
The Two Thumbs
</b>
</font>
<br>
<i>From Coordination, Cooperation</i>
<p align=justify>
An abiding virtue of craftsmen appears in the social imagery of the workshop. Diderot idealized cooperation in the images of papermaking at L'Anglée, its employees laboring together in harmony. Is there some bodily basis for working cooperatively? In the social sciences, that question has been most recently and most often addressed in discussions about altruism. Debate has focused on whether altruism is programmed into human genes. I want to tack in a different direction: What might experiences of physical coordination suggest about social cooperation? This is a question that can be made concrete in exploring how the two hands coordinate and cooperate with each other.
<br><br>
</blockquote>
I don't follow at all.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the two hands
</mark>
are not
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social
</mark>
agents.
<blockquote>
[162]
<p align=justify>
The digits of the hands are of unequal strength and flexibility, impeding equal coordination. This is true even of the two thumbs, whose capabilities depend on whether one is right- or left-handed.
When hand skills develop to a high level, these inequalities can be compensated; fingers and thumbs will do work that other digits cannot perform for themselves. The colloquial English usages of "lending a hand" or the "helping hand" reflect such visceral experience. The compensatory work of the hands suggests—perhaps it is no more than a suggestion—that fraternal cooperation does not depend on sharing equally a skill. ...
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I'm going to use music again as a medium for exploring coordination and cooperation among unequal members, but I'll shift instruments from strings to the piano.
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<br><br>
<p align=justify>
<center>
* * *
</center>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Independence of the hands is a big issue in piano playing, as is independence of the fingers. Simple piano music often assigns the starring melodic role to the fourth and fifth fingers, the weakest in the right hand, and the rock-bottom harmonic role to the equally weakest two fingers in the left hand. These digits must strengthen, and the thumb, the strongest finger in each hand, has to learn to work with them by holding back power. The music vouchsated beginners will most likely
give the right hand a more important role than the left. So, at the outset, the player's hand coordination encounters the problems of reconciling inequalities.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
In jazz piano, this physical challenge becomes even more difficult. Modern jazz piano today seldom separates melody and harmony between the two hands, as they were in barrelhouse blues. In modern jazz piano, rhythms are often set by the right hand rather than, as they once were, by the left. -->
When he first began playing jazz, the pianist and philosopher David Sudnow discovered just how difficult the resulting problems of coordination could be. In his remarkable book Ways of the
Hand, Sudnow, classically trained, recounts how he began to trans-
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[163]
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form himself into a jazz pianist. He began by taking a logical but wrong path.
<p align=justify>
In jazz piano playing, the left hand more often has to execute wide lateral palm stretches or scrunch up its fingers into bundles to achieve the harmonies peculiar to this art. Sudnow began logically enough by sequencing the movements from stretch to scrunch. Correspondingly, he worked separately on the rapid lateral movement of his right hand across wide spaces on the keyboard, the hopping hand that in traditional jazz "strides", in more modern jazz, getting quickly to the piano's upper registers keeps the rhythmic pulse flowing at the top.
<br><br>
Breaking his technical problems into parts proved counterproductive. The separation did little to help him scrunch on the left and stride on the right together. Worse, he overprepared the separate practices, which can be fatal for improvisation.
</blockquote>
Well, a lot of "improvisors" say you can't
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
overprepare
</mark>
because there's not actually much true "improvisation" to be had. Which is to say that preparation itself cannot be fatal to "improvisation," only the preparer himself can be.
<blockquote>
...
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More subtly, working with the two hands separately created a problem for his thumbs. These are the jazz pianist's most valuable fingers, the anchors on the keyboard. But now, anchoring as it were different-sized ships, each traveling its own course, the thumbs couldn't work together.
<br><br>
A eureka moment came to him when he discovered that "a single note would perfectly well suffice" to orientate him. "One note could be played during one chord's duration and another right next to it for another's, and melodies could be done that way." In terms of technique, this means that all the fingers begin to work like thumbs, and the two thumbs begin to interact, taking on each other's roles when needed.
-->
<p align=justify>
Once Sudnow had his eureka moment, he changed his practice procedure. He used all the fingers as true partners. If physically one of these partners was too weak or too strong, he asked another to do the job. Photographs that show Sudnow at work horrify conventional piano teachers; he looks contorted. But hearing him, one senses how easily he plays. He does so because he had at a certain point made coordination his goal whenever he practiced.
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[164]
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There is a biological reason why coordination between unequal members works. The corpus callosum in the brain is a gateway connecting the brain's right motor cortex to its left motor cortex. The
gateway passes information about the control of bodily movement from one side to the other. Practice that divides handwork into parts weakens this neural transfer.
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Compensation also has a biological foundation. <i>Homo sapiens</i> has been described as the "lopsided ape." Physical prehension is lopsided. We reach for things with one hand more than the other—in most humans, with the right hand. ...
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In the cupping grip described by Mary Marzke, the weaker hand cups the object on which the stronger hand works.
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The French psychologist Yves Guiard has studied how to counter lopsidedness—with some surprising results. Strengthening the weaker limb is, as we might expect, part of the story, but exercises aimed at achieving this alone will not make the weaker hand more dexterous. The stronger hand has to recalibrate its strength to permit dexterity to develop in the weaker partner. The same thing is true of fingers. The index finger has to think, as it were, like a fourth finger to "help out." So, too, with the two thumbs: we hear Sudnow's two thumbs working together as one, but physiologically, his stronger thumb is holding back tensile force. This is even more necessary when the thumb helps the weak fourth finger; it needs to behave like a fourth finger. Playing an arpeggio in which the strong left thumb reaches out to assist the weaker right little finger is perhaps the most demanding physical task in cooperative coordination.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Hand coordination confronts a great delusion about how people become skilled. That is to imagine that one builds up technical control by proceeding from the part to the whole, perfecting the work of each part separately, then putting the parts together—as though technical competence resembles industrial production on an assembly line. Hand coordination works poorly if organized in this way. Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, co-
</mark>
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[165]
<br><br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
The arpeggio also provides a hint about the sort of fraternity idealized by Diderot, and after him Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen, the fraternity of people who share the same skill. The real test of their bond comes when they recognize that they share it in unequal degree. The "fraternal hand" represents finger restraint among stronger digits that Yves Guiard sees as the crux of physical coordination; has this a social reflection?
</blockquote>
<p>
How could it?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
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This hint can be taken further by understanding better the role of minimum force in developing hand skills.
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<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
<font size=4>
Hand-Wrist-Forearm
</font>
<br>
<i>The Lesson of Minimum Force</i>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
To make sense of minimum force, let's look into another kind of skilled handwork, the chef's hand.
<p align=justify>
Archaeologists have found sharpened stones used for cutting that are 2.5, million years old; bronze knives date back at least six thousand years, and hammered iron at least 3,500. Raw iron was simpler than bronze to cast and an improvement in knives because it could be more easily sharpened. Today's tempered-steel knives consummate that rude quest for sharpness. The knife, notes sociologist Norbert Elias, has always represented "a dangerous instrument ... a weapon of attack," which all cultures must surround with taboos in peaceable times, especially when knives are used for domestic purposes. Thus, in setting a table, we place the knife with its sharp edge inward rather than facing outward and so threatening our neighbor.
<br><br>
Because of its potential danger, the knife and its use have long been associated symbolically with self-control. For instance, C. Calviac, in his treatise <i>Civilité</i> of 1560, counsels a young person to "cut his meat into very small pieces on his cutting board," then lift the meat to his mouth "with his right hand with three fingers only." This
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[166]
<br><br>
behavior replaced a prior use of the knife as a spear to hold up great chunks of food so that the mouth could gnaw on them. Calviac criticized that way of eating not only because juices were likely to dribble down one's chin or that one ran the risk of inhaling snot and fluids from
the nose but also because it sent no signal of self-restraint.
<br><br>
At the Chinese table, chopsticks have for thousands of years replaced the knife as a peaceable symbol; its use enables small pieces of food to be eaten in the hygenic, disciplined way recommended a mere five hundred years ago by Calviac. The Chinese craftsman's problem was how to deliver food that could be consumed with the peaceable chopsticks rather than the barbaric knife. Part of the solution lies in the fact that, as a killing instrument, the sharpened tip of a knife
matters; as a cooking instrument, the side of the blade counts for more. When China emerged into the hammered-iron age in the Chou dynasty, specialized knives meant only for cooking appeared, notably the cleaver, with its razor-sharp edge and squared-off tip.
<br><br>
The cleaver chef in China, from the Chou dynasty up to recent times, prided himself on using the cleaver as an all-purpose tool, cutting meat into parts, slices, or mince (<i>hsiao</i>, <i>tsu</i>, or <i>hui</i>), whereas less skillful cooks resorted to several knives. The <i>Chuang-tzu</i>, an early Taoist text, celebrated the cook Ting, who used the cleaver to find "the gaps
in the joints," a fine dissection that will ensure that human teeth can get to all the edible meat in an animal. The cleaver chef sought precision in slicing fish and dicing vegetables, increasing edible yield; the knife created regular sizes in animal and vegetable pieces so that they could be cooked more equally in a single pot. The secret enabling these aims is the calculation of minimum force, through the technique of fall and release.
-->
<p align=justify>
Ancient cleaver technique derived from the same kind of choice a home carpenter faces today in deciding how to hammer a nail into wood. One option is to put one's thumb on the side of the hammer's shank in order to guide the tool; all the strength of the blow will then
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[167]
<p align=justify>
come from the wrist. The alternative wraps the thumb around the shank; now one's whole forearm can provide the force. If the home carpenter chooses the second, he or she will increase the raw power of the blow but will also risk losing accuracy in aiming it. The ancient Chinese cleaver chef opted for the second position but worked out a different way to use the combined forearm, hand, and cleaver in order to cut food finely. Instead of hammering a blow, he or she guided from the elbow joint the fused forearm, hand, and cleaver so that the knife edge fell into the food; the moment the blade made contact, the forearm muscles contracted to relieve further pressure.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Recall that the chef holds the cleaver with the thumb around the shank; the forearm serves as an extension of the shank, the elbow as its pivot. At the minimum, the weight of the falling cleaver would provide the only force, which would cleave soft food so that it is not crushed—rather as though the chef is playing pianissimo. But raw food can be harder, and the cook must play, as it were, louder, applying more pressure from the elbow to create a culinary forte. Still, in chopping food, as in sounding chords, the base line of physical control, the starting point, is the calculation and application of minimum force. The cook turns the pressure down rather than scales it up; the chef's very care not to damage the materials has trained him or her to do so. A crushed
vegetable cannot be recovered, but a piece of meat that has not been severed can be salvaged by a repeated, slightly harder blow.
-->
<p align=justify>
The idea of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
minimum force as the base line of self-control
</mark>
is expressed in the apocryphal if perfectly logical advice given in ancient Chinese cooking: the good cook must learn first to cleave a grain of boiled rice.
<p align=justify>
Before teasing out the implications of this craft rule, we need to understand better a physical corollary of minimum force. This is the release. If the cook, like a carpenter, holds the cleaver or hammer down after striking a blow, it works against the tool's rebound. Strain will occur all along the forearm. For physiological reasons that are still not
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[168]
<p align=justify>
well understood, the ability to withdraw force in the microsecond after it is applied also makes the gesture itself more precise; one's aim improves. So in playing the piano, where the ability to release a key is an integral motion with pressing it down, finger pressure must cease at the moment of contact for the fingers to move easily and swiftly to other keys. In playing stringed instruments, as we go to a new tone, our hand can make the move cleanly only by letting go, a microsecond before, of the string it has pressed before. In the musical hand, for this reason, it
is harder to produce a clear, soft sound than to belt out loud notes. Batting in cricket or baseball requires that same prowess in release.
<p align=justify>
In hand-wrist-forearm movement, prehension plays a significant role in the release. The arm assemblage must do the same sort of anticipation as in reaching for a cup but in reverse. Even as the blow is about to occur, the arm assemblage is preparing for the next step, in the microsecond before contact-reaching for release, as it were. ...
<!--
The accounting of objects that Raymond Tallis describes proceeds in this step, as the arm assemblage now undoes the tension involved in gripping, and the hammer or cleaver is held more loosely.
-->
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
"Cleave a grain of rice" thus stands for two bodily rules intimately connected: establish a base line of minimum necessary power, and learn to let go. Technically the point of this connection is control of movement, but it is indeed full of human implication
</mark>
—to which ancient Chinese cookery writers themselves were attuned. The <i>Chuang-tzu</i> advises, do not behave like a warrior in the kitchen, from which Taoism derives a broader ethics for <i>Homo faber</i>: an aggressive, adversarial address to natural materials is counterproductive. Zen Buddhism in Japan later drew on this heritage to explore the ethics of letting go, embodied in archery. ...
<!--
Physically this sport focuses on release of tension in letting go of the bowstring. The Zen writers evoke the lack of physical aggression, the tranquil spirit, which should attend that moment; this frame of mind is necessary for the archer to hit the target accurately.
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[169]
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In Western societies, knife use has also served as a cultural symbol of minimal aggression. Norbert Elias found that Europeans in the early Middle Ages viewed the dangers of the knife rather pragmatically. What Elias calls "the civilizing process" began as the knife took on a more
symbolic importance, summoning to collective mind both the evils and the remedies for spontaneous violence. ...
<!--
"Society, which was beginning at this time.. to limit the real dangers threatening people placed a barrier around the symbols as well," Elias observes. "Thus the restrictions and the prohibitions on the knife increased, along with the restraints on individuals." He means by this, for instance, that in 1400 knife fights might have been a normal event at a supper party but that by 1600 these eruptions were frowned on. Or again, that in 1600 a man encountering a stranger on the street did not automatically put his hand to his hilt.
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<p align=justify>
A "well-bred" person disciplined the body in the most elementary of biological necessities...
<!--
—unlike boors, bumpkins, peasants taken to be, in American slang, "slobs" who farted freely or wiped runny noses on their sleeves.
-->
One consequence of such self-control was to relieve people of aggressive tension. The chef's chopping makes this quixotic proposition more comprehensible: self-control pairs with ease.
<p align=justify>
In examining the emergence of court society in the seventeenth century, Elias was struck by how this coupling had come to define the gracious aristocrat, easy with others and in control of himself; eating properly was one of the aristocrat's social skills. This mark of good manners at table was possible only because the dangers of physical violence were retreating in polite society, the dangerous skills associated with the knife ebbing. In the surging of bourgeois life in the eighteenth century, the code passed downward a grade in social class and changed again in character;...
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easy self-restraint became a mark of the "naturalness" celebrated by the philosophes. The table and its manners still made for social distinction. For instance, the middle class
observed the rule that one should cut, with a knife, only the food that
-->
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[170]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
one cannot slice or pierce with the more delicate but blunter edge of a fork, and snooted the lower orders for using the knife as a spear.
-->
<p align=justify>
Elias is an admirable historian, but he errs, I think, as an analyst of the social life he so vividly describes. He treats civility as a veneer beneath which lies the solid, more personal experience: shame—the real catalyst of self-discipline. His histories of nose blowing, farting, or
pissing in public, like the evolution of table manners, all originate in shame over natural bodily functions, shame over their spontaneous expression; the "civilizing process" inhibits spontaneity. Shame appears to Elias as an inward-turning emotion: "The anxiety that we call 'shame' is heavily veiled to the sight of others . . . never directly expressed in noisy gestures . . . It is a conflict within his own personality; he recognizes himself as an inferior."
<p align=justify>
This strikes a false note applied to aristocrats but rings truer about middle-class mores. Still, <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
this is not an explanation that could in any way apply to the ease or self-control the craftsman seeks
</mark>; shame does not motivate the craftsman learning minimum force and release. Just considered physically, he or she cannot be so driven. There is indeed a physiology of shame, which can be measured by muscular tension in the stomach as well as in the arms—shame, anxiety, and muscular tension form an unholy trinity in the human organism. The physiology of shame would disable the freedom of physical movement that an artisan needs to work. Muscular tension is fatal to physical self-control. Put positively, as muscles develop in bulk and definition, the reflexes that cause them to tense become less pronounced; physical activity becomes smoother, less jerky. This is why <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
people whose bodies are physically strong are more capable of calibrating minimum force than people whose bodies are weak;
</mark>
a gradient of muscle force has developed. Well-developed muscles in the body are equally more capable of release. They maintain shape even when they let go. Mentally, the craftsman of words could no more explore and use them well if he or she were full of anxiety.
<p align=justify>
To be just to Elias, we might imagine that self-control has two
<p align=justify>
[171]
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dimensions: one a social surface beneath which there lies personal distress, the other a reality at ease in itself both physically and mentally, a reality that serves the craftsman's development of skill. This second dimension carries its own social implication.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Military and diplomatic strategy must constantly judge degrees of brute force. The strategists who used the atomic bomb decided that overwhelming force was needed to achieve Japanese surrender. In current American military strategy the "Powell doctrine" proposes an intimidating number of soldiers massed on the ground, while the doctrine of "shock and awe" substitutes technology for men—a massive amount of robot missiles and laser-guided bombs thrown hard against an enemy all at once. A contrary approach has been proposed by the political scientist and diplomat Joseph Nye, dubbed by him "soft power"; it is more the way a skilled craftsman would work. In hand coordination the issue turns on inequalities of strength; the unequal hands working together rectify weakness. Restrained power of the craftsman's sort, coupled with release, takes a further step. The combination provides the craftsman's body self-control and enables accuracy of action; blind, brute force is counterproductive in handwork. All these ingredients—cooperation with the weak, restrained force, release after attack—are present in "soft power"; this doctrine, too, seeks to transcend counterproductive blind force. Here is the craft contained in "state-craft."
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<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
<font size=4>
Hand and Eye
</font>
<br>
<i>The Rhythm of Concentration</i>
<br><br>
"Attention deficit disorder" currently worries many teachers and parents, focused on whether children can pay attention for sustained periods rather than attend to short moments. Hormonal imbalances account for some of the causes of attention deficit, cultural factors for others. About the latter, the sociologist Neil Postman spawned a large body of research on the negative effects watching television produces
<br><br>
[172]
<br><br>
in children. Students of expertise often define attention span, however, in terms that may not seem entirely useful in responding to such adult worry.
<br><br>
As mentioned at the outset of this book, ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert. ...
<!--
In studies of "composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, . . . and master criminals," the psychologist Daniel Levitin remarks, "this number comes up again and again."
-->
This seemingly huge time span represents how long researchers estimate it takes for complex skills to become so deeply ingrained that these become readily available, tacit knowledge. Putting the master criminal aside, this number is not really an enormity. The ten-thousand-hour rule translates into practicing three hours a day for ten years, which is indeed a common training span for young people in sports. The seven years of apprentice work in a medieval goldsmithy represents just under five hours of bench work each day, which accords with what is known of the workshops. The grueling condition of a doctor's internship and residency can compress the ten thousand hours into three years or less.
<p align=justify>
The adult worry about attention deficits, by contrast, is much smaller in scale: how a child will manage to concentrate even for one hour at a time. Educators frequently seek to interest children mentally and emotionally in subjects in order to develop their skills of concentration. The theory on which this is based is that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
substantive engagement breeds concentration
</mark>
. The long-term development of hand skills shows
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the reverse</mark>
of this theory.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The ability to concentrate for long periods
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
comes first
</mark>
; only when a person can do so will he or she get involved emotionally or intellectually. The skill of physical concentration follows rules of its own, based on how people learn to practice, to repeat what they do, and to learn from repetition. Concentration, that is, has an inner logic; this logic can, I believe, be applied to working steadily for an hour as well as for several years.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
To fathom the logic we might explore further the relations between
<p align=justify>
[173]
<p align=justify>
the hand and the eye. The relations between these two organs can organize the process of practicing in sustainable ways. We could find no better guide than Erin O'Connor about how the hand and eye together learn to how to concentrate. A philosophical glassblower, she has explored the development of long-term attention through her own struggles to fashion a particular kind of wineglass. She reports in the pages of an august scholarly journal that she has long enjoyed the
Barolo wines of Italy and therefore sought to fashion a goblet big and rounded enough to support the fragrant "nose" of the wine. To accomplish this, she had to expand her powers of concentration from the short- to the long-term.
<br><br>
The frame for this learning was the critical moment in the craft of glassblowing when molten glass is gathered at the end of an extended narrow pipe. The viscous glass will sag unless the pipe is constantly turned. In order to get a straight bead, the hands have to do something akin to twirling a teaspoon into a pot of honey. All the body is involved in this handwork. To avoid strain when twirling the pipe, the glassblower's back must incline forward from the lower rather than upper torso, like a rower reaching for the beginning of a stroke. This posture also steadies the craftsman in drawing back molten glass out of the furnace. But critically important is the relation of hand and eye.
<br><br>
In learning to make a Barolo goblet O'Connor passed through stages that resemble those we've explored among musicians and cooks. She had to "untape" habits she'd learnt in blowing simpler pieces in order to explore why she was failing, discovering, for instance, that the easy way that had become her habit meant that she scooped too little molten glass at the tip. She had to develop a better awareness of her body in relation to the viscous liquid, as though there were continuity
between flesh and glass. This sounds poetic, though poetry was perhaps dispelled by the shouted comments of her mentor, "Slow it down there, cowgirl, keep it steady!" O'Connor happens to be small and demure; wisely, she took no offense. Her coordination thereby increased.
<br><br>
[174]
<br><br>
Now she was better positioned to make use of the triad of the "intelligent hand"—coordination of hand, eye, and brain. Her coach urged, "Don't take your eyes off the glass! It (the molten gob at the blow-tip) is starting to hang!" This had the effect of her loosening her grip on the tube. Holding it more lightly, as a cleaver chef would his knife, she increased her control. But she still had to learn how to lengthen her concentration.
<br><br>
This stretch-out occurred in two phases. First, she lost awareness of her body making contact with the hot glass and became all-absorbed in the physical material as the end in itself: "My awareness of the blowpipe's weight in my palm receded and in its stead advanced the sensation of the ledge's edge at the blowpipe's mid-point followed by the weight of the gathering glass on the blowpipe's tip, and finally the gather towards a goblet." The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes what she experienced as "being as a thing." The philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it "focal awareness" and recurs to the act of hammering a nail: "When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail. . . . I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail." If I may put this yet another way, we are now absorbed in something, no longer self-aware, even of our bodily self. We have become the thing on which we are working.
<br><br>
This absorbed concentration now had to be stretched out. The challenge O'Connor met was the result of a further failure. Though her well-positioned, relaxed, absorbed self had succeeded in gathering the glass into a bubble and forming it into the desired Barolo-friendly shape, the glass, when left to cool, turned out "lopsided and stout," a thing now dubbed by the master craftsman a "globlet."
<br><br>
The problem, she came to understand, lay in dwelling in that moment of "being as a thing." To work better, she discovered, she needed to anticipate what the material should become in its next, as-yet-non-
-->
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[175]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
existent, stage of evolution. Her instructor called this simply "staying on track"; she, rather more philosophically minded, understood that she was engaged in a process of "corporeal anticipation," always one step ahead of the material as molten liquid, then bubble, then bubble
with a stem, then stem with a foot. She had to make such prehension a permanent state of mind, and she learned to do so, whether she succeded or failed, by blowing the goblet again and again. Even had she succeeded the first time by chance, she would have practiced it, in order to ensure the acts of gathering, blowing, and turning in her hands. This is repetition for its own sake: like a swimmer's strokes, sheer movement repeated becomes a pleasure in itself.
<br><br>
-->
<p align=justify>
We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labor, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it's nothing like this.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Doing something over and over is stimulating when organized as looking ahead.
</mark>
The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one's experience of doing it again. There's nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled craftsman has extended rhythm to the hand and the eye.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Rhythm has two components: stress on a beat and tempo, the speed of an action. In music, changing the tempo of a piece is a means of looking forward and anticipating. The markings <i>ritardando</i> and <i>accelerando</i> oblige the musician to prepare a change; these large shifts in tempo keep him or her alert. The same is true of rhythm in miniature. If you play a waltz strictly in time using a metronome, you will find it increasingly hard to focus; the act of regularly stressing a beat requires micropauses and microspurts. To recur to the discussion in the previous chapter, repeated stress on a beat establishes the type-form. Tempo shifts are like the varied species that emerge within this generic rubric. Prehension is focused on the tempo; the musician concentrates productively.
-->
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[176]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The rhythm that kept O'Connor specifically alert lay in her eye disciplining her hand, the eye constantly scanning and judging, adjusting the hand, the eye establishing the tempo. The complexity here is that she was no longer conscious of her hands, she no longer thought about what they were doing; her consciousness focused on what she saw; ingrained hand motions became part of the act of seeing ahead. For the musician, the conductor appears visually just slightly ahead, indicating the sound, the executant registering that signal again just in the microsecond before making the sound happen.
-->
<p align=justify>
I fear that my descriptive powers have reached their limit in describing the rhythm involved in concentration, and I have certainly made this experience seem more abstract than it is. The signs of a person who concentrates in practicing are concrete enough. A person who has learned to concentrate well will not count the number of times he or she repeats a motion at the command of the ear or the eye. When I am deep into practicing the cello, I want to do a physical gesture again and again to make it better but also do it better so that I can do it again. So too with Erin O'Connor. She is not counting how often; she wants to repeat breathing down the blowpipe, holding and turning it in her hands. Her eye, however, sets the tempo. When the the two elements
of rhythm combine in practicing, a person can stay alert for long periods, and improve.
<p align=justify>
What then of the substance one practices? Does one practice a three-part invention by J. S. Bach better than an exercise by Ignaz Moscheles just because the music is better? My own experience is, no; the rhythm of practicing, balancing repetition and anticipation, is itself engaging. Anyone who has learned Latin or Greek as a child might reach the same conclusion. Much of this language learning was "rote," its substance remote. Only gradually did the routines that enabled us to learn the Greek language help us gain interest in a long-vanished, foreign culture. As for other apprentices who have not yet fathomed
<p align=justify>
[177]
<p align=justify>
the content of a subject, learning to concentrate has to come first. Practicing has its own structure and an inherent interest.
<p align=justify>
The practical value of this advanced handwork to people dealing with attention deficit disorder consists in focusing attention on how practice sessions are organized.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Rote learning is not in itself the enemy.
</mark>
Practice sessions can be made interesting through creating an internal rhythm for them, no matter how short; the complicated actions performed by an advanced glassblower or cellist can be simplified while preserving the same structuring of time. We do a disservice to those who suffer from attention deficit disorder by asking that they understand before they engage.
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
<center>
* * *
</center>
<p align=justify>
The view of good practicing may seem to slight the importance of commitment, but commitments themselves come in two forms, as decisions and as obligations. In the one, we judge whether a particular action is worth doing or a particular person is worth spending time with; in the other, we submit to a duty, a custom, or to another person's need, not of our own making. Rhythm organizes the second kind of commitment; we learn how to perform a duty again and again. As theologians have long pointed out, religious rituals need to be repeated to become persuasive, day after day, month after month, year upon year. The repeats are steadying, but in religious practice they are not stale; the celebrant anticipates each time that something important is about to happen.
<p align=justify>
I moot this large point in part because the practicing that occurs in repeating a musical phrase, chopping meat, or blowing a glass goblet has something of the character of a ritual. We have trained our hands in repetition; we are alert rather than bored because we have developed the skill of anticipation. But equally, the person able to perform a duty again and again has acquired a technical skill, the
<p align=justify>
[178]
<p align=justify>
rhythmic skill of a craftsman, whatever the god or gods to which he or she subscribes.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
<!--
<br><br>
<center>
米 米 米
</center>
<br><br>
This chapter has pursued in detail the idea of the unity of head and hand. Such unity shaped the ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; it grounded Ruskin' nineteenth-century defense of manual labor. We haven't followed quite in their path, for we've charted forms of mental understanding that emerge from developing specialized and rarefied hand skills, whether these be playing perfectly in tune, cleaving a grain of rice, or blowing a difficult goblet. But even such virtuoso skills are based on fundamentals of the human body.
<br><br>
Concentration consummates a certain line of technical development in the hand. The hands have had before to experiment through touch, but according to an objective standard; they have learned to
coordinate inequality; they have learned the application of minimum force and release. The hands thus establish a repertoire of learned gestures. The gestures can be further refined or revised within the rhythmic process that occurs in, and sustains, practicing. Prehension presides over each technical step, and each step is full of ethical implication.
</blockquote>
-->
<br><br><br><br>
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<p align=justify>
[181] Display translates into a craft command frequently given young writers: "Show, don't tell!" In developing a novel this means avoiding such declarations as "She was depressed," writing instead something like "She moved slowly to the coffee pot, the cup heavy in her hand." Now we are shown what depression is. The physical display conveys more than the label. Show, don't tell occurs in workshops when the master demonstrates proper procedure through action; his or her display becomes the guide. Yet this kind of miming contains a wrinkle.
<br><br>
The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master's lesson by osmosis; the master's demonstration shows an act successfully performed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice
</mark>
; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails. In music conservatories, for instance, the master often has trouble putting him- or herself back into the rude state of the pupil, unable to show the mistake, only the right way. Sacks observes that deaf people learning signage have to work hard to figure exactly what they should be absorbing about what the instructor has actually done.
</blockquote>
<p>
The literary example would profitably be stated this way too:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
show
</mark>
ing
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
puts the burden on the
</mark>
reader...and it may be a burden, or it may just be an invitation. But
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
tell</mark>ing
is not an invitation.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
[185] Child's recipe reads quite differently than Olney's precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird. The resulting language is indeed full of analogies, but these analogies are loose rather than exact, and for a reason. Cutting a chicken's sinew is technically like cutting a piece of string, but it doesn't feel quite the same. This is an instructional moment for her reader; "like" but not "exactly like" focuses the brain and the hand on the act of sinew cutting in itself: There's also an emotional point to loose analogies; the suggestion
<p align=justify>
[186]
<p align=justify>
that a new gesture or act is roughly like something you have done before aims specifically to inspire confidence.
<p align=justify>
In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, sympathy was thought to bind people together, as for Adam Smith, who asked his readers to enter into the misfortunes and limits of other human beings. Sympathy in his view instructs ethically—but not because we are supposed to imitate the misfortunes and difficulties of other people; understanding them better, we will be more responsive to their needs. The writer of instructional language who makes the effort of sympathy has to retrace, step by step, backward knowledge that has bedded in to routine, and only then can take the reader step by step forward. But as an expert, he or she knows what comes next and where danger lies; the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice; sympathy and
prehension combine. This is Julia Child's method.
<p align=justify>
Child is occasionally criticized by chefs for being a fuzzy writer and in the same breath for being too detailed. Each of these six steps is necessary, however, because there are so many danger points in cooking this particular dish. Supporting the reader at such moments places a burden on any writer who aims to instruct expressively. He or she has to recover the sentiment of insecurity.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The paralyzing tone of authority and certainty in much instructional language betrays a writer's inability to re-imagine vulnerability.
</mark>
In craftwork done for ourselves, we of course seek for closure. Child, as I've observed her in televised presentations, adopts a particular, not to say peculiar, way of holding the boning knife. Practice has led her to arrive at that decision; the practice has given her confidence; she bones without hesitation. When we wish to instruct, however, particularly in the fixed medium of print, we have to return emotionally just to the point before such habits were formed,
in order to provide guidance. So for a moment Child will imagine holding the knife awkwardly; the cello master will return to playing wrong notes. This return to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives.
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
[212]
<!--
These are the four elements, then, involved in making an intuitive leap: reformatting, adjacency, surprise, gravity. The sequence is not strict, at least in its first two stages; sometimes comparing two unlike tools can prompt the realization that each might be used differently. In the piano maker's toolbox, for instance, the pick used to soften piano
hammers happens to lie next to a felt knife. Staring at this conjunction, made simply because they are the same size, one might be prompted to think that the awl could also be used to lift felt, though it was not designed for that task.
<br><br>
-->
However the first stages are ordered, why call the cumulative process of an intuitive leap "intuitive"? Isn't what I've described a form of reasoning? It is reasoning, but not of a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
deductive
</mark>
sort, and it constitutes a special form of
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
induction.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br>
<!--
Intuitive leaps defy syllogisms. Classical logic provides syllogisms such as the following ancient nostrum: "All men are mortal / Socrates is a man / Therefore Socrates is mortal." The first line is the axiom, or major premise, and is a universal proposition. The flow in the syllogism
in the second statement is from the general to the particular. The third statement makes a deduction based on this flow. Induction has shaped the first statement; it declares a general truth that all men are mortal, which we decide to explore by applying the generality to a particular case and finally by drawing a conclusion.
-->
<p align=justify>
[220]
<!--
The second response to resistance concerns patience.
-->
The frequently noted patience of good craftsmen signals a capacity to stay with frustrating work, and patience in the form of sustained concentration, we have seen in Chapter 5, is a learned skill that can expand in time. But Brunel was also patient, or at least determined, over many years. Here a rule can be formulated, opposite in character to the frustration-aggression syndrome: when something takes longer than
<p align=justify>
[221]
<p align=justify>
you expect, stop fighting it. This rule operated in the pigeon maze Festinger contrived in his laboratory. At first the disoriented pigeons banged against the plastic walls of the maze, but as the birds proceeded further, they stopped attacking the walls even though they remained confused; they trudged more composedly forward, still not knowing where they were going. But this rule is not quite as simple as it seems.
<p align=justify>
The difficulty lies in judging time. If a difficulty lasts, one alternative to giving up is to reorient one's expectations. In most work we estimate how long it will take; resistance obliges us to revise. The error might seem that of imagining we could accomplish a task quickly, but the wrinkle is that we have to fail consistently to make this revision—or so it seemed to the author of <i>The Art of Archery</i>. The Zen master offers his counsel to stop fighting specifically to that neophyte who fails again and again to hit the target. The patience of a craftsman can thus be
defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.
<p align=justify>
...
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
[234] The practitioner's skill in these designs can be likened to the "uncle logic" that lay in Elizabeth David's recipe, a conclusion left intentionally unstated, or, more concretely, to the use in writing of the ellipsis (...). As in writing, the designer uses such a device best by following the modernist principle that less is more.
</blockquote>
<p>
Ah
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
modernis</mark>m,
all things to all people.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
That is, effectively using an ambiguity forces its maker to think about economy. Ambiguity and economy seem unlikely bedfellows, but they take their place in the larger family of craft practices if
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
we think of creating ambiguity as a special instance of applying minimum force
</mark>.
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Van Eyck was thus quite selective about where he placed blurred edges in his playgrounds; usually the relation of playground space to the doorways of buildings is by contrast sharp, highly defined. So too would I have misled if conveying
-->
<p align=justify>
...
</blockquote>
<br>
<!--
<hr>
<h5>
***technique-creativity nexus***
</h5>
Richard Sennett
<i>The Craftsman</i>
(2008)
[164] <i>"Hand coordination confronts a great delusion about how people become skilled. That is to imagine that one builds up technical control by proceeding from the part to the whole, perfecting the work of each part separately, then putting the parts together—as though technical competence resembles industrial production on an assembly line. Hand coordination works poorly if organized in this way. Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, co-
</i>[165]<i>ordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start."</i>
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-74058596380778968102024-03-08T14:52:00.000-08:002024-03-08T14:52:17.289-08:00Sennett—The Craftsman (ii)<br>
<p>
Richard Sennett
<br>
<i>The Craftsman</i>
<br>
(2008)
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...
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The label refers to labor in the high-technology, finance, and human services sectors, supported by global investors, conducted in institutions that are more flexible, responsive, and focused on the short-term than in the rigid bureaucratic cages of the past. My students and I focused on people who write computer code, do accounting in backoffices, or arrange shipments to local stores in a retail chain—all competent but without sexy job titles or showy incomes.
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<p align=justify>
The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
protected from the rigors of competition
</mark>
. Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.
<p align=justify>
It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...
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We found that people made a show of friendliness and cooperation under the watchful eyes of boss- minders rather than, as in good Japanese firms,
challenging and disputing their superiors.
-->
<p align=justify>
[36]
<p align=justify>
Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return
</mark>
—Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book <i>Bowling Alone</i>, as the result of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
television culture and the consumerist ethic
</mark>
; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
people's experiences at work
</mark>
.
<p align=justify>
If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[38] Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.
<p align=justify>
Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual's attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming
bored. There are "Eureka!" moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[58] The apprentice's presentation focused on imitation: learning as copying. The journeyman's presentation had a larger compass. He had to show managerial competence and give evidence of his trustworthiness as a future leader. The difference between brute imitation of procedure and the larger understanding of how to use what one knows is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a mark of all skill development. The medieval workshop was distinctive in the authority invested in the teachers and judges of this progress. The master's verdicts were final, without appeal. Only rarely would a guild interfere in the judgments of individual masters in a workshop, for in his person the master united authority and autonomy.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[70] "Originality" traces its origins back to one Greek word, <i>poesis</i>, which Plato and others used to mean "something where before there was nothing." Originality is a marker of time; it denotes the <i>sudden</i> appearance of something where before there was nothing, and because something suddenly comes into existence, it arouses in us emotions of wonder and awe. In the Renaissance, the appearance of something sudden was connected to the art—the genius, if you will— of an individual.
<p align=justify>
We'd certainly err by imagining that medieval craftsmen were entirely resistant to innovation, but their craftwork changed slowly and as the result of collective effort. For instance, the immense Salisbury Cathedral began, in 1220-1225, as a set of stone posts and beams that established the Lady Chapel at one end of the future cathedral. The builders had a general idea of the cathedral's eventual size, but no more. However, the proportions of the beams in the Lady Chapel suggested a larger building's engineering DNA and were articulated in the big nave and two transepts built from 1225 to about 1250. From 1250 to 1280, this DNA then generated the cloister, treasury, and chapter house; in the chapter house the original geometries, meant for a square structure, were now adapted to an octagon, in the treasury to a six-sided vault. How did the builders achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed in the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.
<p align=justify>
The result is a striking building, a distinctive building embodying innovations in construction, but it is not original in the sense that Cellini's saltcellar is: an amazing blow, a painting in pure gold. As earlier remarked, the "secret" of originality here is that the two-dimensional practice of drawing has been transferred to the three dimensions of
<p align=justify>
[71]
<p align=justify>
gold, and Cellini pushed this transfer to an extreme that his contemporaries had not imagined possible.
<p align=justify>
But originality carried a price. Originality could fail to provide autonomy. Cellini's <i>Autobiography</i> is a case study of how originality could breed new kinds of social dependence and, indeed, humiliation. Cellini left the guild realm of assay and metal production only to enter court life with all its intrigues of patronage. With no corporate guarantee for the worth of his work, Cellini had to charm, hector, and plead with kings and princes of the Church. These were unequal trials of strength. Confrontational and self-righteous as Cellini could be to patrons, ultimately his art depended on them. There was in Cellini's life a telling moment when this unequal trial of strength became clear to him. He sent Philip II of Spain the sculpture of a naked Christ in marble, to which the king rather wickedly added a fig leaf made of gold. Cellini protested that the distinctive character of the Christ was spoiled, to which Philip II replied, "It's mine."
<p align=justify>
We would say now this is a matter of integrity—the integrity of the thing in itself—but it's also a matter of the maker's social standing. Cellini, as he repeatedly stresses in his autobiography, was not to be measured like a courtier, by a formal title or a post at court. But any person who stands out still has then to <i>prove</i> him- or herself to others. The medieval goldsmith furnished proof of his worth through communal rituals, proof about the work's worth through the process of proceding slowly and carefully. These are irrelevant standards for judging originality. Put yourself in Philip II's elegant shoes: faced with an original and so unfamiliar object, how would you evaluate its worth? Confronted with Cellini's declaration, "I am an artist! Don't touch what I've done!" you, in your kingly majesty, might well think, "How dare he?"
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
We're long overdue here for a disentangling, an un-confounding. "Don't touch what I've done" indeed ought not belong to the regime of artistic
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
autonomy
</mark>
. I don't see how "autonomy" can extend for the lifespan of the artifact without becoming onerous upon pretty much everyone else besides the artist. That point I certainly agree with. (When I was at CalArts, there was a brand new performance space that sounded great when it was full of people but otherwise was far too live. The architect, I am told, would not permit so much as the mere strategic hanging of curtains, and the school, being an Art School, could not possibly proceed without the artist's permission. Therefore, everyone got to be equally unhappy together in tribute to artistic integrity.)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
What all of this really has to do with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
originality
</mark>
I am less sure of. The implication is that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
patrons
</mark>
are familiar with and hence know how to respond to derivative works, whereas less can be assumed with "original" ones;
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
court life with all its intrigues
</mark>
meant
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
unequal trials of strength
</mark>
between the artist's "original" vision and everyone else's befuddlement at it. Is this some kind of consequentialist argument that "original" work is bound to be disincentivized and derivative work incentivized? All the same if one has already secured a "patron" as if not? This is indeed a safe assumption! But it seems to fold into the staple concept of "autonomy" many luxuries as well.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
By now I'm at risk of putting words in the author's mouth, but I find this passage incoherent otherwise. To declare that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Originality could fail to provide autonomy
</mark>
is to suggest that someone previously insisted that it <i>should</i>; and that, I have thought for a long time now, is a deadly trap which the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
new economy
</mark>
sets for us, and which Sennett seems to walk right into with this particular order of operations and definition of terms. There are a few corollaries which tend to go along with all of this, corollaries which he definitely does not add but which, again, make the passage more coherent if they are assumed. One is: the arts "matter." Another is: people respond to incentives, and artists are no different.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
I would insist on the opposite in any case. Reframing the arts sector of the economy as "essential" is itself the most profound loss of autonomy imaginable. In Talebian terms, industries that "matter" are <i>fragile.</i> Real autonomy is when you don't "matter." That's the only way that no one will try to tell you what to do.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
The incentivization argument is more difficult to deal with simply. The counterexamples are all anecdotal and circumstantial; conversely, there definitely are a few people around, some of them very accomplished artists, who do evince an Econ101 mindset, both implicitly and explicitly. There is the potential here, at least, for a novel application of Rank's theories, a case for the fear of death and the <i>causa-sui</i> project as the ultimate "incentives." This can hardly be decisive, but it must be accounted for. He seeks to explain both the inner and outer compulsions driving artists, compulsions which are not at all financial, though in keeping with the psychoanalytic roots of this school of thought we might still say that they are "economic" in the broader sense.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
A final, signal fact about Cellini's <i>Autobiography</i> is that his experiences of unrequited dependency and misunderstanding heightened his self-consciousness. Again and again in these pages, humiliation at the hands of a patron drives the writer to bouts of introspection.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
What a terrible thing for an artist to be forced into a reflective rather than merely declarative mode...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
This
<p align=justify>
[72]
<p align=justify>
condition was just the opposite of the passive, and so brooding, isolation pictured in the pages of Burton's <i>Anatomy of Melancholy</i>. Here the Renaissance artist may well be the emblematic first modern man: active, and so suffering, driven inward, searching for a refuge in his "autonomous creativity."
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Can people really be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
driven
</mark>
in such a direction as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
introspection
</mark>
suggests? It seems to me that this is hardly the inevitable outcome of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
unrequited dependency and misunderstanding
</mark>,
though if that is indeed what is afoot then it is bound to have some effect or other. But being "great" and being
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
first
</mark>
, even together, do not add up to being a "representative example." They add up to being
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
emblematic
</mark>
, which is to say, they are what is left over after journalists and novelists have cut away all of the granular details that were getting in the way of a good story.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In this view, creativity lies within us, no matter how society treats us.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Straw man alert?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
That belief became powerfully grounded in Renaissance philosophy. It appeared in the writings of the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who envisaged <i>Homo faber</i> to mean "man as his own maker." Pico was one of Hannah Arendt's (unacknowledged) sources; his <i>Oration on the Dignity of Man</i> of 1486 was based on the conviction that, as the force of custom and tradition wanes, people have to "make experience" for themselves. Each person's life is a narrative in which the author does not know how the story will turn out. Pico's figure for <i>Homo faber</i> was Odysseus, voyaging through the world, not knowing where he would land. A kindred idea of man as his own maker also appears in Shakespeare, when Coriolanus asserts, "I am my own maker," and thus
defies the adage of Augustine, who warned, "Hands off the self! Touch
it and you make a ruin!"
<p align=justify>
Art plays a particular role in this life voyage, at least for artists. The work of art become like a buoy at sea, marking out the journey. Unlike a sailor, though, the artist charts his own course by making these buoys for himself. This is how, for instance, Giorgio Vasari proceeds in <i>The
Lives of the Artists</i> (1568), one of the first books ever written to chart artistic careers. Vasari's "lives" concern artists who develop within, who brought forth works despite all impediments, artists whose creative urge is autonomous. Works of art are the evidence of an inner life sustained even in the face of humiliation and incomprehension—as indeed Cellini sometimes faced. Renaissance artists discovered that originality does not provide a solid <i>social</i> foundation of autonomy.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well, if we are headed for a soft-deconstructionist takedown of <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
modern man
</mark>
and his conceit to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
autonomous creativity
</mark>
, we might at least keep in mind that the poor sap does not <i>necessarily</i> run afoul of Augustine's stricture simply by seeking artistic "autonomy." To exclaim <i>"I am my own maker"</i> upon creating a sculpture, drama, or symphony is to imply that the work is quite literally an extension of yourself. But self-styling may or may not be a part of the "autonomous" artist's relationship to their work, no matter what others might project upon them and it; and self-styling may or may not be the manner in which the work is received by an audience.
<p>
Dare I say Sennett seems to be the one putting words in people's mouths here; specifically, it seems he is trying to put the words of Pico and Coriolanus (at least) in the mouths of later aspirants to "autonomy." But perhaps these later aspirants have struck a fairer deal with their communities than
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Renaissance philosophy
</mark>
could manage. Perhaps they aren't expecting as much in return for their "autonomous" creavity as Sennett is expecting on their behalf.
</p>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[92] The pages of the <i>Encyclopedia</i> then look more particularly at usefulness and uselessness. In one telling plate, a maid appears industriously at work on a lady's coiffure. The maid radiates purpose and energy while her mistress languishes in ennui; the skilled servant and her bored mistress compose a parable of vitality and decadence. Diderot believed boredom to be the most corrosive of all human sentiments, eroding the will (Diderot continued throughout his life to explore the psychology of boredom, culminating in his novel <i>Jacques the Fatalist</i>). In the <i>Encyclopedia</i>, Diderot and his colleagues celebrated the vitality rather than dwelled on the sufferings of those deemed socially interior. Vigor was the point: the encyclopédistes wanted ordinary workers to be admired, not pitied.
<p align=justify>
This positive emphasis was grounded in one of the eighteenth century's ethical touchstones, the power of sympathy. As our forebears understood sympathy, it did not quite conform to the biblical moral injunction to "treat thy neighbor as thyself." As Adam Smith observed in <i>The Theory of Moral Sentiments:</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
"As we can have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in a like situation."
</mark>
Entering into others' lives requires therefore an act of imagination. David Hume made the same point in his <i>Treatise of Human Nature:</i>...
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"Were I present at any of the more terrible operations
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<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[94] This too-brief summary of the <i>Encyclopedia</i>'s origins and general aims sets the stage for probing what it is that people learn by learning their limits. The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them: "We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession." The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do some thing but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery the use, and the things they produce with any clarity."
<p align=justify>
[95]
<p align=justify>
A very large problem lurks in this observation. Inarticulate does not mean stupid; indeed,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
what we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things
</mark>
. Craftwork establishes a realm of skill and knowledge perhaps beyond human verbal capacities to explain; it taxes the powers of the most professional writer to describe precisely
how to tie a slipknot (and is certainly beyond mine). Here is a, perhaps <i>the</i>, fundamental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror-tool" for the physical movements of the human body. And yet I am writing and you are reading a book about physical practice; Diderot and
his collaborators compiled a set of volumes nearly six feet thick on this subject.
<p align=justify>
One solution to the limits of language is to substitute the image for the word. The many plates, by many hands, that richly furnish the <i>Encyclopedia</i> made this assist for workers unable to explain themselves in words, and in a particular way. In illustrations of glassblowing, for
instance, each stage of blowing a glass bottle appears in a separate image; all the junk of an ordinary workshop has been eliminated, and the viewer focuses on just what hands and mouth need to do at this moment to transform the molten liquid into a bottle. The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "decisive moments."
<p align=justify>
It might be possible to imagine an experience of enlightenment strictly as a visual experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind.
<p align=justify>
[96]
<p align=justify>
The Western Enlightenment followed both the photographic procedure and another path to understanding. The limits of language can be overcome through active involvement in a practice, Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker. "There are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that.. it has often been necessary to get hold of such machines, set them in operation, and lend one's hand to the work." A real challenge for a man
used to salons. We don't know precisely what manual skills Diderot attempted, though in his professional circumstances they were likely those of setting type and pulling etchings. His plunge into manual labor was logical if unusual for a culture in which the ethos of sympathy urged people to get out of themselves, enter other lives. However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
enlightenment through practice—or as modern educators have it, learning by doing—raises the question of one's talent to act and so the possibility of learning little, because one is not good at actually doing the work.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
Many of Diderot's collaborators were scientists for whom trial and error was a guiding method of experiment. Nicolas Malebranche, for example, imagined the process of trial and error as following a path from many to fewer errors, a steady and progressive improvement through experiment. "Enlightenment" dawns as error decreases. The commentary Diderot provides on his experiences in workshops seems at first to echo this scientific version of failure corrected: "Become an
apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones." "Bad results" will cause people to reason harder, and so improve.
<br><br>
But trial and error can lead to quite a different result if one's talents prove insufficient to ensure ultimate mastery. So it was for Diderot, who found that by plunging into practice, many of his faults and errors proved "irremediable." Daring to fail evinces a certain strength; one is
willing to test why things don't or do work out, reckon limits on skill one can do nothing about.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In this light, learning by doing, so comfort-
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[97]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ing a nostrum in progressive education, may in fact be a recipe for cruelty: The craftsman's workshop is indeed a cruel school if it activates our sense of inadequacy.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well, again (and again and again...), <i>"no one can make you feel inferior without your permission."</i> So,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
if
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
our sense of inadequacy
</mark>
is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
activate
</mark>
d, this may be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cruelty
</mark>
or it may just be self-data.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Surely we also are on the scent here of a massive confounding factor which "the new science of expertise" hasn't yet got a whiff of.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
To the social philosopher, the intersection of practice and talent poses a general question about agency: we are minded to believe that engagement is better than passivity. The pursuit of quality is also a matter of agency; the craftsman's driving motive. But agency does not happen in a social or emotional vacuum, particularly good-quality work. The desire to do something well is a personal litmus test; inadequate personal performance hurts in a different way than inequalities
of inherited social position or the externals of wealth:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is about you
</mark>
. Agency is all to the good, but actively pursuing good work and finding you can't do it corrodes one's sense of self.
<p align=justify>
Our ancestors too often turned a blind eye to this problem. The progressive eighteenth century strongly proclaimed the virtues of "careers open to talent"—talent rather than inheritance the just foundation of upward mobility in society. Proponents of this doctrine could easily neglect, in their drive to destroy inherited privilege, the fate of the losers in competition based on talent.
</blockquote>
See, Lasch. But this is oblique to the self-esteem issue, no?
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Diderot was unusual in paying attention to such losers, from his earliest books to mature works like <i>Rameau's Nephew</i> and <i>Jacques the Fatalist</i>; in them, the inadequacy of talent rather than social circumstance or blind chance begets the most grinding form of ruin. Still, the effort of exposure and engagement has to be made. In a letter, Diderot remarks that only the rich can afford to be stupid; for others, ability is a necessity, not an option. Talent then runs its race. This is the outline of a tragedy, but in Diderot's pages
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the losers can gain something as well. Failure can temper them; it can teach a fundamental modesty even if that virtue is gained at great pain.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
See, Lasch.
<p>
What is overlooked by almost everyone who writes on such topics is that <i>virtuousos are constantly failing</i>. Having the highest self-standards and the highest ambitions, in effect they are "failing" much more often than the grinders. Failure with a world championship at stake can be crushing for a superstar athlete in a way that initial humiliations cannot be, even though such failure simulatenously evinces ability which surpasses all besides the victorious opponent.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
"Salutary failure" had earlier appeared in Michel de Montaigne's essays, pages in which God disciplines humanity through showing us what we cannot do.
</blockquote>
<p>
Perfect.
</p>
<p>
<br><br>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[102] Diderot's friend Louise d'Épinay, in her letters of advice to her granddaughter, <i>Conversations d'Émilie</i>, confronted this version of model parenthood. She disputed first of all Rousseau's parental division of labor. A mother who trusts to her own instincts alone will not do enough to form a child's character; a father who acts as a stern man of reason risks driving the child inside him- or herself. More to our purposes, she challenges Rousseau's ideal of the exemplary model-parent. She believes that adults need to accept being "good enough" parents rather than "perfect parents"—as does her heir, Benjamin Spock, author of the most useful guide to parenting in modern times. As matter of common sense, parents need to accept their limitations, a lesson that, in any event, independent-minded children will teach them.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
But the real issue is self-image that parents hold up to their children: rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect. "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits, "Therefore you should…." Find your own way innovate rather than imitate.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--\
I don't mean to push Madame d'Épinay into the arms of philosophy; but her forgotten little book is largely provocative. It contains the same force as Kant's famous image of the "twisted timber of humanity," a call to recognize and accept limits. Returning in the direction of the glassworks, this call matters as much in the workshop as in the nursery or the library. The challenge in the workshop is to treat the idea
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[105] Only a generation after the <i>Encyclopedia</i> appeared, Adam Smith had concluded that machines would indeed end the project of enlightenment, declaring in <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> that in a factory "the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Diderot's circle reached for another conclusion, which I would formulate as follows:
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine's potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection.
</mark>
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Against the claim of perfection we can assert our own individuality, which gives distinctive character to the work we do. Modesty and an awareness of
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[113] ...the book that secured Ruskin's fame, <i>The Seven Lamps of Architecture</i>, in 1849. Gothic stonework, he says, is a "grammar," a "flamboyant" grammar, one form generating another sometimes by the stonemason's will, sometimes simply by chance; "flamboyance" is his cognomen for "experiment." In <i>The Stones of Venice</i> of 1851-1853 this word takes on a deeper cast. Now Ruskin is beginning to contemplate, as we have seen among Linux programmers, the intimate connection between problem solving and problem finding. A "flamboyant" worker, exuberant and excited, is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
willing to risk losing control
</mark>
over his or her work: machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents. The surrender of control, at least temporarily, now gives Ruskin a recipe for good craftsmanship and how it should be taught. In <i>The Stones of Venice</i> Ruskin invents this figure of a draftsman who has temporarily lost control of his work:
<blockquote>
You can teach a man to draw a straight line; to strike a curved line, and to carve it . . . with admirable speed and precision; and you will find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that, he was only a machine before, an animated tool.
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Ruskin's draftsman will recover, and his technique will be the better for the crisis he has passed through. Whether like the stonemason one leaves in the nicks and mistakes or whether like the draftsman one recovers the ability to make exact, straight lines, the craftsman is now become self-conscious. His is not the path of effortless mastery; he has had troubles, and he has learned from them. The modern craftsman should model himself or herself on this troubled draftsman rather than on Count Dumin's Man of Steel.
<br><br>
[114]
<br><br>
Ruskin's <i>Seven Lamps of Architecture</i> provided seven guides, or "lamps," for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:
<blockquote>
•"the lamp of sacrifice," by which Ruskin means, as I do, the willingness to do something well for <i>its</i> own sake, dedication;
<br>
•"the lamp of truth," the truth that "breaks and rents continually"; this is Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity;
<br>
•"the lamp of power," tempered power, guided by standards other than blind will;
<br>
•"the lamp of beauty," which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design;
<br>
•"the lamp of life," life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection;
<br>
•"the lamp of memory," the guidance provided by the time before
machinery ruled; and
<br>
•"the lamp of obedience," which consists of obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not
seek to copy his particular violins.
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
As a vein of radical thought, Ruskin refuses the present, looks backward in order to look forward. Ruskin sought to instill in craftsmen of all sorts the desire, indeed the demand, for a lost space of freedom; it would be a free space in which people can experiment, a supportive space in which they could at least temporarily lose control. This is a condition for which people will have to fight in modern society. Ruskin believed that the rigors of the industrial age work against experiences of free experiment and salutary failure; had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that in America there are no second chances. For Ruskin, the craftsman serves as an emblem for all people in the very need of the opportunity for "hesitation . . . mistakes"; the craftsman must transcend
<p align=justify>
[115]
<p align=justify>
working by the "lamp" of the machine, become in his or her doubts more than an "animated tool."
<p align=justify>
What would Diderot have made of the seven lamps guiding the craftsman? Certainly the encyclopédiste would have appreciated Ruskin's humanity, but he would have insisted that reason could play a greater role in it, and that the modern machine, even a robot, serves a purpose in human self-understanding. Ruskin might reply that Diderot had not yet learned the hard truth of industrial power. Diderot might counter that Ruskin's lamps illuminate how craftsmen have done their work well but offer no real guidance about the materials the modern craftsman has to hand. Put in modern terms, we might compare Ruskin to Heidegger; Ruskin did not yearn to escape to a dream-hut; he sought instead another sort of material practice and another sort of social engagement.
<p align=justify>
<center>
* * *
</center>
<p align=justify>
In its time, Ruskin's craftsman appeared a Romantic figure, and as a Romantic trope the craftsman served as a counterweight to the Romanticism embodied in the emblem of the artist as technical virtuoso.
<p align=justify>
In the early eighteenth century a virtuoso like Chambers, with wide-ranging interests, rather prided himself on his amateurism. In Chambers's day Antonio Stradivari would not have been labeled a virtuoso; his genius ran in one channel only. In Britain, the gentleman amateur has retained a certain snobbish cachet, as has his opposite number, the gentleman who evinces effortless, casual mastery. Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either. But the specialist virtuoso also has an unsettling relation to technique.
<p align=justify>
In music, the virtuoso obsessed by technique took to the public stage in the mid-eighteenth century. Sheer finger dexterity became a display that audiences paid to hear in the new realm of public concert performances; the amateur listener began to applaud—as an inferior.
<p align=justify>
[116]
<p align=justify>
This situation marked a contrast to the performances in courts in which Frederick the Great, for instance, played the flute parts in the compositions he commissioned from his hired musicians or, earlier, the role as lead dancer Louis XIV frequently took in the spectacles mounted at Versailles. Both kings were highly skilled performers, but in courts the line between performer and audience, technical master and amateur, was blurred.
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, these were literally <i>kings</i> at court, whereas the later
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
amateur listener
</mark>
was merely bourgeois. Does that really permit of any such comparison?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Diderot's novel <i>Rameau's Nephew</i> marks the firmness of this new line as it began to be drawn in his time. This dialogue in part asks what is technical mastery and answers that it is the fruit of heroic struggle, man's battles with an instrument. The dialogue then poses the question whether technical flamboyance compromises artistic integrity. In the history of music the answer to that question became ever more pressing, from Niccolò Paganini to Sigismond Thalberg to Franz Liszt in their public appearances during the
first half of the nineteenth century. They dramatized the heroics of technique, Paganini and Thalberg diminishing thereby the musical virtues of simplicity and modesty.
<p align=justify>
By the 1850s the musical virtuoso appeared to be someone whose technical skill had developed to such perfection that amateur players in an audience
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
felt small
</mark>
, almost worthless in comparison.
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, is there not a healthy (micro)dose of small-feeling-ness that we could all use from time to time? And might not we do well to receive it in the course of a leisure activity rather than something more fraught?
<p>
One envies any
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
audience
</mark>
members who were not
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
amateur players
</mark>
themselves, since they would presumably not be quite so apt to jump straight to self-comparison with the virtuouso <i>du jour</i>.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The rise of the virtuoso on stage coincided with silence and immobility in the concert hall, the audience paying fealty to the artist through its passivity. The virtuoso shocks and awes.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In exchange, the virtuoso unleashed in listeners passions they could not produce using their own skills.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
Ah yes, well there is that part of it.
<p>
The value and implications of said
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
passions
</mark>
certainly may be problematized. Generally though, it is not too bright to force each and all upon our own meager resources to such a degree that even passive spectatorship must be dispensed with. When anything we cannot produce ourselves makes us
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
feel small
</mark>
, it seems we are trapped between two bad options. Also that we have given someone else permission to make us feel inferior.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Ruskin loathed this ethos of the Romantic virtuoso. The craftsman's hesitations and mistakes have nothing in common with such a performance; the musical analogue to Ruskin's celebration of the craftsman would be <i>haus-musik</i>, in which amateurs learned the classics on their own terms. But Ruskin shifted the scene in which the compromised virtuoso appears, from the concert hall to the engineering works.
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, our author has already said it:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either
</mark>
the "gentleman amateur" or the "effortless master." Between cancer surgery and <i>haus-musik</i> there are innumerable intermediate situations which are ill-served by appeal to rhetorical extremes.
<br><br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[128] Like potting, these permutations in weaving occurred slowly, distilled by practice rather than dictated by theory. What endures, what does not decay, is the technique of focusing on the right angle. Domain shifts, when stated baldly, seem counterintuitive: at first glance it makes no sense to liken a ship to a cloth. But the craftsman's slow working through forges the logic and maintains the form. Many propositions that seem counterintuitive are not so; we just don't know their connections yet. Plodding craft labor is a means to discover it.
<p align=justify>
Domain shifts are the metamorphoses that most struck the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Ovid of modern anthropology; the
<p align=justify>
[129]
<p align=justify>
subject of metamorphosis preoccupied him throughout his long life. The foundational craft for him is cooking rather than potting, weaving, or carpentry, but the logic of change in his view applies to all crafts. He presents change as a culinary triangle, in his words, a "triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked, and the rotted." The raw is the realm of nature, as human beings find it; cooking creates the realm of culture, nature metamorphosed. In cultural production, Lévi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (<i>bonne à manger</i>) and good to think with (<i>bonne à penser</i>). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think. These are domain shifts.
</blockquote>
<p>
...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[143] The pre-industrial brickmaker was not entirely innocent; one traditional means of making new brick look old consisted of coating laid bricks with pig-manure slime. In the factories, this effect could be achieved before the bricks arrived on site—quicker to use and with no need of pigs.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Intellectuals imagine the "simulacrum" to be a product of "postmodernity"; brickworkers had to cope with simulacra long before.
</mark>
The traditional craftsman could only defend the brickmaking sphere by maintaining that he or she could detect the difference between real and simulated, but this was a matter for colleagues and cognoscenti. In fact, industrialized advances in brickmaking have made the differences ever harder to detect.
</blockquote>
<br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***romd https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2014/11/reports-of-my-demise-iv.html ***
</h5>
Richard Sennett
<i>The Craftsman</i>
(2008)
[36] <i>"firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return—Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book </i>Bowling Alone<i>, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>
***whatever thread has taleb's remark about the color blue***
</h5>
Richard Sennett
<i>The Craftsman</i>
(2008)
[92] "<i>...one of the eighteenth century's ethical touchstones, the power of sympathy. As our forebears understood sympathy, it did not quite conform to the biblical moral injunction to "treat thy neighbor as thyself." As Adam Smith observed in </i>The Theory of Moral Sentiments:<i> "As we can have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in a like situation." Entering into others' lives requires therefore an act of imagination. David Hume made the same point in his </i>Treatise of Human Nature:<i>..."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
-->Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-5942950427587516192024-03-07T16:50:00.000-08:002024-03-07T16:50:11.133-08:00Sennett—The Craftsman (i)<br>
<p>
Richard Sennett
<br>
<i>The Craftsman</i>
<br>
(2008)
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<h3>
Prologue: Man as His Own Maker
</h3>
<br><br><br>
<p>
<font size=3>
Pandora's Casket
<br>
<i>Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer</i>
</font>
<p align=justify>
Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis,...
<!--
the days in 1962 when the world was on the brink of atomic war,
-->
I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In <i>The Human Condition</i>, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ...
<!--
She had come to this conviction by the time the Los Alamos project created the first atomic bombs in 1945. Now, during the missile crisis, Americans too young for the Second World War had also felt real fear. It was freezing cold on the New York street, but Arendt was oblivious.
-->
She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.
<p align=justify>
Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Well,
<br>
if a given
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
fear
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
well and truly
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
traces back</mark>,
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
then it is <i>not</i>
<p style="margin-left: 3%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
her
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
fear.
<br><br>
And
<br>
if it <i>is</i>
<br>
"her" fear,
<br>
then it does not
<br>
"trace back."
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
A goddess of invention, Pandora was "sent to earth by Zeus as punishment for Prometheus's transgression." ...
<!--
Hesiod described Pandora in <i>Works and Days</i> as the "bitter gift of all the gods" who, when she opened her casket (or in some versions, her jar) of new wonders, "scattered pains and evils among
-->
<p align=justify>
[2]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
men."
-->
In the working out of Greek culture, its peoples came increasingly to believe that Pandora stood for an element of their own natures; culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
So, this notion that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm
</mark>,
<br>
this also <strike>traces back</strike> recurs?
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
If "culture" simply denotes "all beyond necessity,"
<br>
then
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
man-made things
</mark>
are no more or less fit to serve.
<br>
Perhaps it is when <i>necessity itself</i> is in thrall to earthly contrivances that things can get (have gotten) dicey.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Augustine's dictum <i>"hands off yourself"</i> takes the self as given.
<br>
Whereas culture,
<br>
definitionally and paradigmatically,
<br>
is contingent.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Perhaps?
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Something nearly innocent in human beings can produce this risk: men and women are seduced by sheer wonder, excitement, curiosity, and so create the fiction that opening the casket is a neutral act. About the first weapon of mass destruction, Arendt could have cited a diary note made by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project. Oppenheimer reassured himself by asserting, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."
<p align=justify>
The poet John Milton told a similar story about Adam and Eve, as an allegory for the dangers of curiosity, with Eve taking the Oppenheimer role. In Milton's primal Christian scene, the thirst for knowledge, rather than for sex, leads human beings to harm themselves. Pandora's image remains potent in the writings of the modern theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who observes that it is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible should therefore be tried.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
You've heard the saying about "having the right enemies?"
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Are these the right enemies to have?
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Let's go looking for some better ones...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Arendt's generation could put numbers to the fear of self-destruction, numbers so large as to numb the mind. ...
<!--
At least seventy million people perished in wars, concentration camps, and gulags in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.
-->
In Arendt's view, these numbers represent the compound of scientific blindness and bureaucratic power—...
<!--
bureaucrats minded just to get the job done, embodied for her by the Nazi death-camp organizer Adolf Eichmann, to whom she attached the label "the banality of evil."
-->
<p align=justify>
Today, peacetime material civilization posts equally numbing figures of self-made self-harm: one million, for instance, represents the number of years Nature took to create the amount of fossil fuel now consumed in a single year. The ecological crisis is Pandoric, man-made; technology may be an unreliable ally in regaining control. ...
<!--
The
-->
<p align=justify>
[3]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
mathematician Martin Rees describes a revolution in microelectronics that creates at least the possibility of a robotic world beyond the powers of ordinary human beings then to rule; Rees envisions such exotica as self-replicating microrobots intended to clean smog that might instead devour the biosphere. A more urgent example is genetic engineering of both crops and animals.
-->
<p align=justify>
Fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread—but dread can be itself paralyzing, indeed malign. Technology itself can seem the enemy rather than simply a risk. Pandora's environmental casket was too easily closed, for instance, in a speech given by Arendt's own teacher, Martin Heidegger, near the end of his life, at Bremen in 1949. On this infamous occasion Heidegger "discounted the uniqueness of the Holocaust in terms of the 'history of man's misdeeds' by comparing 'the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camp' to mechanized agriculture." In the historian Peter Kempt's words,
"Heidegger thought that both should be regarded as embodiments of the 'same technological frenzy' which, if left unchecked, would lead to a worldwide ecological catastrophe."
<p align=justify>
If the comparison is obscene, Heidegger speaks to a desire in many of us, that of returning to a way of life or achieving an imaginary future in which we will dwell more simply in nature.
</blockquote>
<p>
<i>Now</i> we've found the "right" enemy. But how many others have found more decorous ways of saying the same thing and thereby avoided being called
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
obscene
</mark>
?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
As an old man Heidegger wrote in a different context that "the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving," against the claims of the modern machine world. A famous image in these writings of his old age invokes "a hut in the Black Forest" to which the philosopher withdraws, limiting his place in the world to the satisfaction of simple needs. This is perhaps a desire that could be kindled in anyone facing the big numbers of modern destruction.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Maybe I'm actually starting to lose it, but all it takes for me to feel this way is to leave the house and take a look around. The envious living are more terrifying than the enviable dead.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In the ancient myth, the horrors in Pandora's casket were not humans' fault; the gods were angry. Pandora-fear in a more secular age is more disorienting: the inventors of atomic weapons coupled curiosity with culpability; the unintended consequences of curiosity are
<p align=justify>
[4]
<p align=justify>
hard to explain. Making the bomb filled Oppenheimer with guilt, as it did I. I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, and many others who worked at Los Alamos. In his diary, Oppenheimer recalled the Indian god Krishna's words, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Experts in fear of their own expertise: what could be done about this terrible paradox?
</blockquote>
<p>
Decentralization of power
<br>
and
<br>
the broadest possible education
<br>
are where I would start.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
When Oppenheimer gave the Reith Lectures for the BBC, subsequently published as <i>Science and the Common Understanding</i>, in 1953—broadcasts intended to explain the place of science in modern society—he argued that treating technology as an enemy will only render humanity more helpless. Yet, consumed by worry over the nuclear bomb and its thermonuclear child, in this political forum he could offer his listeners no practical suggestions about how to cope with it. Though confused, Oppenheimer was a worldly man. ...
<!--
He was entrusted at a relatively young age with the bomb project during the Second World War, he combined a first-class brain with the talent to manage a large group of scientists; his skills were both scientific and corporate.
-->
But to these insiders, too, he could provide no satisfying picture of how their work should be used. Here are his parting words to them on November 2, 1945: "It is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values."
<p align=justify>
The creator's works become the public's problem. As David Cassidy, one of Oppenheimer's biographers, has observed, the Reith Lectures thus proved "a huge disappointment for both the speaker and his listeners." If the experts cannot make sense of their work, what of the public? Though I suspect Arendt knew little about physics, she took up Oppenheimer's challenge: let the public indeed deal with it. ...
<!--
She had a robust faith that the public could understand the material conditions in which it dwells and that political action could stiffen humankind's will to be master in the house of things, tools, and machines. About the weapons in Pandora's casket, she told me, there should have been pub-
-->
<p align=justify>
[5]
<p align=justify>
<!--
lic discussion about the bomb even while it was being made; whether rightly or wrongly, she believed that the secrecy of the technical process could have been protected even as this discussion occurred. The reasons for this faith appear in her greatest book.
-->
<p align=justify>
<i>The Human Condition</i>, published in 1958, affirms the value of human beings openly, candidly speaking to each other. Arendt writes, "Speech and action ... are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but <i>qua</i> men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human." And she declares, "A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world." In this public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed. Though this affirmation of talk may well seem idealistic, Arendt was in her own way an eminently realistic philosopher. She knew that public discussion of human limits can never be the politics of happiness.
<p align=justify>
Nor did she believe in religious or natural truths that could stabilize life. Rather, like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Arendt believed that a polity differs from a landmarked building or "world heritage site": laws should be unstable. This liberal tradition imagines that the rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt's contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics. The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts—yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of <i>The Human Condition</i> explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Tons to reckon with there, starting with actually reading Arendt firsthand. For now, dare I say the part of this I have the most trouble with is not the "liberal" formalism or the grand analogy of "natality." Rather, it is the line,
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
as conditions change and people ponder further</mark>.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Similarly,
<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/01/paul-goodmancommunication-and-censorship.html">Paul Goodman</a>:
<blockquote>
<p style="margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 15%">
<i>
it is because moral problems are so publicly important...that they must be ongoingly decided by all groups, as well as individuals; and they are so subtle that only the manifold mind of all the institutions of society, skirmishing and experimenting, can figure them out and invent right solutions.
</i>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Dare I ask,
<br>
sincerely and more-than-rhetorically,
<br>
<i>what has <b>really</b> changed?
<br>
what remains to be</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ponder</mark><i>ed?</i>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
In a time when "natality" itself is as bound up as anything else with signalling and self-styling, it doesn't take a knee-jerk skeptic or radical postmodernist to wonder if the need being met here is <i>not</i> the need for new rules but rather the need of all these <i>new people</i> to have new important stuff to do that they can later say they did. And what could be more important or more visible than the law itself?
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[6]
<p align=center>
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
<p align=justify>
As her student almost a half-century ago, I found her philosophy largely inspiring, yet even then it seemed to me not quite adequate to deal with the material things and concrete practices contained in Pandora's casket. The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher—as Arendt was—unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument. Arendt's difficulty in dealing with Pandora seemed to me, dimly then and more clearly now, to lie in the distinction she draws between <i>Animal laborans</i> and <i>Homo faber</i>. ...
<!--
(<i>Man</i> does not, clearly, mean just men. Throughout this book, when I have to deal with gendered language, I'll try to make clear when man refers generically to human beings and when it applies only to males.)
-->
These are two images of people at work; they are austere images of the human condition, since the philosopher excludes pleasure, play, and culture.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Um...okay.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<i>Animal laborans</i> is, as the name implies, the human being akin to a beast of burden, a drudge condemned to routine. Arendt enriched this image by imagining him or her absorbed in a task that shuts out the world, a state well exemplified by Oppenheimer's feeling that the atomic bomb was a "sweet" problem, or Eichmann's obsession with making the gas chambers efficient. In the act of making it work, nothing else matters; Animal laborans takes the work as an end in itself.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Hmm. It sounds like there is <i>plenty</i> of affect here, actually. I would not expect mere
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
beast</mark>s
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
of burden
</mark>
to have these particular
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
obsession</mark>s
or
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
feelings
</mark>
about the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
routine
</mark>
to which they have been
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
condemned
</mark>
. Perhaps the question is, to what are they <i>actually</i> attached? What exactly makes a problem "sweet," and in whose eyes?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
By contrast, <i>Homo faber</i> is her image of men and women doing another kind of work, making a life in common. Again Arendt enriched an inherited idea. The Latin tag <i>Homo faber</i> means simply "man as maker." The phrase crops up in Renaissance writings on philosophy and in the arts; Henri Bergson had, two generations before Arendt, applied it to psychology; she applied it to politics, and in a special way. <i>Homo faber</i> is the judge of material labor and practice, not <i>Animal laborans</i>'s colleague but his superior. Thus, in her view, we human beings live in two dimensions. In one we make things; in this condition we are amoral, absorbed in a task. We also harbor another, higher way
<p align=justify>
[7]
<p align=justify>
of life in which we stop producing and start discussing and judging together. Whereas <i>Animal laborans</i> is fixated in the question "How?"
<i>Homo faber</i> asks "Why?"
<p align=justify>
This division seems to me false
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Me too. But whose
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
division
</mark>
is it, really?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
because it slights the practical man or woman at work. The human animal who is <i>Animal laborans</i> is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
And if someone is very much
<br>
"at work"
<br>
but not
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
working together
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
with other people
</mark>
<br>
?
<br>
Then what?
</p>
<blockquote>
For Arendt, the mind engages once labor is done.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Again, I still haven't read Arendt directly. Either because or in spite of this, it's hard to believe that the above sentence is a fair representation.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<u>Modernism</u>: "[thing] is [thing]."
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<u>Postmodernism</u>: "[thing] that [modernist we don't like anymore] thought was merely [thing] really is also [seventeen really good things]. this we can be sure of. but don't say we said [thing] is not still [thing], just as [modernist we don't like anymore] thought. rather, we're keeping our options open depending on [contingency]."
</p>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Balanced
</mark>
? Not really.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Sure, if we're at least conscious and upright, then <i>some</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
thinking and feeling
</mark>
must be
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
contained within
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the process of making</mark>;
but only the most elementary of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
process</mark>es permit us to reflect in real time. More likely, we need distance from the previous project and we need not to be consumed with the next project. I was once told by a high school math teacher (who was also a parent of my euphonium student) that "forgetting time" is crucial to learning. This seems to be part of it too.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
The mid-project
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
engage</mark>ment
of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mind
</mark>
is not a reflective engagement. I would say...it is <i>definitionally</i> not reflective. The above remark seems not "balanc[ing]" but rather <i>defensive</i> first and foremost; defensive, that is, against the notion that <i>mere</i> craftspeople are not particularly smart or reflective...which, if they rely entirely on what they're able to learn <i>while working</i> and not at all on later reflection on and about the work, they certainly are not! I assume this is where the epithet "craft idiot" comes from. Perhaps that is the (admittedly very unkind) assessment which the author here seeks to "balance." At this early juncture I confess I'm not yet convinced.
</p>
<!--
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The sharp edge of this perhaps self-evident observation lies in its address to Pandora's box. Leaving the public to "sort out the problem" after the work is done means confronting people with usually irreversible facts on the ground. Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt's stripe. To cope with Pandora requires a more vigorous cultural materialism.
<p align=justify>
The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not make for ourselves and that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides
roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h5>[[this is a bit weird and seems to require some more earlier excerpting from the book to make sense]]</h5>
<p align=justify>
[7] Whereas <i>Animal laborans</i> is fixated in the question "How?"
<i>Homo faber</i> asks "Why?"
<p align=justify>
This division seems to me false because it slights the practical man or woman at work. The human animal who is <i>Animal laborans</i> is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
And if someone is very much "at work" but not
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
working together
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
with other people
</mark>
? Then what?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
For Arendt,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the mind engages once labor is done
</mark>
. Another, more balanced view is that
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Balanced
</mark>
? Not really.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Sure,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
thinking and feeling
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
are contained within
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the process of making,
</mark>
, but only the most elementary of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
process</mark>es permit us to reflect in real time. More likely, we need distance from the project, we need not to be consumed with a current project
in order to reflect and refine.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
The mid-project
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
engage</mark>ment
of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mind
</mark>
is not a reflective engagement. I would say...it is <i>definitionally</i> not reflective. The above remark seems not "balanc[ing]" but rather <i>defensive</i> first and foremost; defensive, that is, against the notion that <i>mere</i> craftspeople are not particularly smart or reflective...which, if they rely entirely on what they're able to learn <i>while working</i> and not at all on later reflection on and about the work, they certainly are not!
</p>`
-->
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The sharp edge of this perhaps self-evident observation lies in its address to Pandora's box. Leaving the public to "sort out the problem" after the work is done means confronting people with usually irreversible facts on the ground. Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt's stripe. To cope with Pandora requires a
more vigorous cultural materialism.
<p align=justify>
The word <i>materialism</i> should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not make for ourselves and that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[9] "Craftsmanship" may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective
standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
I suppose you could call these
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Social and economic conditions
</mark>
. But it would be more concrete and more to the point to say that it is <i>other people</i> who
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
often stand in the way
</mark>
, i.e. via "the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions." Making <i>other people</i> into part of the environment by abstracting them into "conditions" has the disadvantage of confounding any efforts (should such efforts still be believed in and/or become necessary to believe in) to hold individuals accountable for their actions.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
If we're on the hunt for ghosts in the machine of society, then I would favor the good ol' "structural" line over equivocal talk of "conditions." The failure to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
value the aspiration for quality
</mark>
is an observable output both of certain "structures" and of certain "people." "Conditions" meanwhile seems to encompass everything and hence to obscure this distinction, a distinction which must be heeded, I think, if we are to try to do anything about it. (What unintended consequences might this beget?)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by
obsession.
<p align=justify>
<i>The Craftsman</i> explores these dimensions of skill, commitment, and judgment in a particular way. It focuses on the intimate connection between hand and head. Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello—but
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen. There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled, just as there is nothing mindlessly mechanical about technique itself.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
My note says:
<br>
"parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship.
<br>
In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards."
<br>
Lays bare a tension in Lasch: the inevitable outcome of "objective standards" and of "citizenship" "improving when it is practiced" is...a <u>certain</u> amount, at least, of Progress.
<br><br>
also p. 33—"Within the framework of competition...clear standards of achievement and closure are needed to measure performance and dole out rewards.
<br>
(Contrasts competition with the community imperative.)
<br>
So, an affinity (if not quite an inevitable one) between "objective standards" and economic "competition."
</p>
<br><br>
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-37852801537470450372024-03-04T20:06:00.000-08:002024-03-04T20:06:30.421-08:00Bodies and Artifacts (interlude)—Sennett's Materialism<br>
<p>
Richard Sennett
<br>
<i>The Craftsman</i>
<br>
(2008)
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[7] The word <i>materialism</i> should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
More than one thing can be true of course. This rage to understand
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
social norms
</mark>
from every conceivable angle has, among other things, put beyond reproach the notion that said norms are in fact
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mirror</mark>ed
pretty much anywhere we might seek or find them. This certainly leads to things not being fully or properly considered
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
in themselves
</mark>
. The above paragraph is yet another useful reiteration of the general thrust of this series. But it stops short of asking such questions as the following:
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
If social norms are reflected in everything, mustn't there nonetheless be vast differences among various
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
objects</mark>'
ways of mirroring?
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Given such different ways, mustn't our various methodologies for identifying and analyzing said mirroring be as vastly different as the objects we study?
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
(Saying "methodologies" is just a jiveass way of saying: don't be a jiveass.)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
(I wonder if, contrary to popular opinion, "analyzing" is the <i>easy</i> part? And "identifying" the hard part?)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Moreover, mustn't some such inquiries be more or less urgent than others?
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
(Academic politics anyone?)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
I wonder if social norms are not in fact circular in the same way as are semantics; not because social norms <i>are</i> necessarily semantic-al in nature but because they exist concurrently with each other and cannot help but interact. Or maybe they are (also?) like McLuhan's <i>media</i>: the content of a social norm is other social norms.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
In any case, if I dare pile onto Sennett's dustup with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Marxism
</mark>
and
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the social sciences
</mark>
with as yet very little concrete ammunition, I would say that in any case "social norms" themselves cannot possibly be the simple things that coinages such as <i>two-ness</i> or <i>conditional love</i> or <i>cutting contest</i> (or indeed <i>social norms</i>!) may mislead us into thinking. As suggested earlier in the series, to
un-<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
debase
</mark>
the relevant
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
material
</mark>
considerations means ascribing to them the objectivity which died-or-was-killed right along with <i>the author</i> and <i>the subject</i>, a noisy but victimless mass extinction which unfolded piecemeal in approximately the 1960-1995 date range.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
To be sure, this objectivity <i>is</i> problematic. It can be made as problematic as I above have made the question of identifying social norms. This objectivity is a <i>social fiction</i> whereas norms are <i>social facts</i>; such is the basis for the denial of all epistemological anchor points; that is, the denial of all standpoints from which, say, a <i>cutting contest</i> is <i>exactly what it fucking looks like</i> to an armchair sociologist and what it sounds like to a fellow initiate, and <i>not anything like</i> what it looks like to the academic sociologist nor what it sounds like to the breathless arriviste.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
The basis for indulging in the social fact of material objectivity is something like
<a href="http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/11/bodies-and-artifacts-second.html">Arendt's remark</a>
about "retrieving their sameness." It seems to me that this retrieval is possible even if we are in fact living in a hologram, even if in fact Bach really is no better or worse than Britney, etc. Moreover, the possibility of retrieval presents <i>itself</i> as a material fact to the extent that it evinces <i>predictive power</i> prospectively. (<i>Explanatory power</i> is retrospective and, in this particular capacity, meaningless.)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Elsewhere,
<a href="http://fickleears.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20and%20technics%20%28mumford%29">Mumford</a>
namechecks all of the reasons why historically people maybe just didn't want to perform the retrieval, did not want to be reminded of their "sameness." Looking around today (and I do think sociologists are helpful here) it is not hard to arrive at a facile and parsimonious theory that this problem has intensified to where it is an explicit and central problem of <i>modern life</i> that being reminded of one's "sameness" has become literally traumatic to the the point that every available <i>material</i> means will be enlisted to escape or repress it, and that it is overcome, if at all, only with great difficulty. (Put more simply: self-styling is an intense psychological need created by developed societies; this requires the constant denial of materiality, often enough it would seem as an unthinking byproduct rather than itself a primary motivator; but it is a denial all the same; it is <i>autoplastic</i> rather than <i>alloplastic</i>; it is <i>explanatory</i> rather than <i>predictive</i>; therefore it can and probably will fail spectacularly and traumatically.)
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
<a href="http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/bodies-and-artifacts-iiijones-voice.html">Jones</a>
performs the problem on multiple levels. Start with the strawman metaphor of the "artifact" applied to the sound that comes out of the saxophone (or certain saxophones when played by certain white musicians). Materially, the compression crests and troughs set into motion respectively by Paul Desmond and Charles Parker were not nearly so different as were the various thoughts and feelings they were bound to arouse in various listeners; and this <i>rarely if ever</i> unaccompanied by intense awareness of the player's race. Usually this is a superfluous observation, but Jones makes it more important than it should be when he finds the meaningful difference between these players in their supposedly differing material relationships to the instrument. It seems to me that the "unity," if that's what it was, of Parker with the instrument can be fully believed in and experienced only by Parker himself; which also means that only Parker himself can really know (though even he may not!) whether this is actually what's happening. The conceit of any listener to have a direct window into the soul of this "unity" simply by <i>digging</i> it is not to be taken seriously.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
This is actually being kind. It is almost impossible for a professional musician to take seriously either (1) the ascription of a unity even to such a facile technician as Parker, or (2) this dubious ascrpition of it to Parker <i>but not</i> to Desmond based (as it must be) on the listener's experience and not the players'; as if such a leap is made in the first case less because it explains (<i>much</i> less predicts!) anything at all, but rather because it can then be withheld for rhetorical advantage. Good luck finding any professional musician to endorse this view of things; arrivistes on the other hand seem to have no such trouble. Such is life after the death (and prior to the resurrection) of the author and the subject.
<p style="margin-right: 15%">
Speaking for myself, the subjective experience of unity with the instrument is incredibly elusive. I wouldn't say it is unknown, but it is very rare. Meanwhile, the material fact of unity doesn't exist. It <i>cannot</i> exist for instrumentalists. Ascriptions to this effect are arriviste projections, and an eloquent arriviste is a much tougher problem than a dunderheaded one.
</p>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-73170688886420565432024-03-03T17:50:00.000-08:002024-03-03T17:50:18.723-08:00Neil Postman—Amusing Ourselves To Death<br>
<p>
Neil Postman
<br>
<i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>
<br>
(1984)
<br>
</p>
<hr>
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<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[9]
<!--
formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato.
-->
In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system <i>unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.</i> We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
abstract, universal
</mark>
deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any
<mark style="color: lightgrey; background-color: green">
concrete, iconographic
</mark>
forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.
<p align=justify>
Speech, of course, is the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means. This is not to say that if there were no other means of communication all humans would find it equally convenient to speak about the same things in the same way. We know enough about language to understand that variations in the
<p align=justify>
[10]
<p align=justify>
structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language. We dare not suppose therefore that all human minds are unanimous in understanding how the world is put together. But how much more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
His aphorism
</mark>
, however,
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
is in need of
</mark>
<mark style="color: lightgrey; background-color: green">
amendment
</mark>
because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
message
</mark>
with a
<mark style="color: lightgrey; background-color: green">
metaphor
</mark>
. A message denotes
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
a specific, concrete statement about the world
</mark>
. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors,
<mark style="color: lightgrey; background-color: green">
working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality
</mark>
. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so
enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.
</font>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[11]
<p align=justify>
What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times, Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "'moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically
measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
[13] All that Plato surmised about the consequences of writing is now well understood by anthropologists, especially those who have studied cultures in which speech is the only source of
complex conversation. Anthropologists know that the written word, as Northrop Frye meant to suggest, is not merely an echo of a speaking voice. It is another kind of voice altogether, a
conjurer's trick of the first order. It must certainly have appeared that way to those who invented it, and that is why we should not be surprised that the Egyptian god Thoth, who is
alleged to have brought writing to the King Thamus, was also the god of magic. People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange
and magical it appears to a purely oral people—
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
a conversation with no one and yet with everyone
</mark>
. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?
<p align=justify>
I bring all of this up because what my book is about is how our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics. What I mean to point out here is that
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking—and, of course, of the content of his culture.
</mark>
And that is what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor. We are told in school, quite correctly, that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion, it so fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other: Light is a wave; language, a tree; God, a wise and venerable man; the
mind, a dark cavern illuminated by knowledge. And if these
<p align=justify>
[14]
<p align=justify>
metaphors no longer serve us, we must, in the nature of the matter, find others that will. Light is a particle; language, a river; God (as Bertrand Russell proclaimed), a differential equation; the mind, a garden that yearns to be cultivated.
<p align=justify>
But our media-metaphors are not so explicit or so vivid as these, and they are far more complex. In understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, the context in which their information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself
</mark>
. It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth.
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br><br><br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
[16]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides,
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
</mark>
Therein is our problem, for
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high
</mark>
, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do.
</mark>
The trouble
<p align=justify>
[17]
<p align=justify>
with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself trivial.
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br><br><br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
[22]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
<!--
The point I am leading to by this and the previous examples is that
-->
...the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind
<p align=justify>
[23]
<p align=justify>
of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant. Indeed, to the Greeks of Aristotle's time, and for two thousand years afterward, scientific truth was best discovered and expressed by deducing the nature of things from a set of self-evident premises, which accounts for Aristotle's believing that women have fewer teeth than men, and that babies are healthier if conceived when the wind is in the north. Aristotle was twice married but so far as we know, it did not occur to him to ask either of his wives if he could count her teeth. And as for his obstetric opinions, we are safe in assuming he used no questionnaires and hid behind no curtains. Such acts would have seemed to him both vulgar and unnecessary, for that was not the way to ascertain the truth of things. The language of deductive logic provided a surer road.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br><br>
...
<br><br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[31] We know that on the <i>Mayflower</i> itself several books were included as cargo, most importantly, the Bible and Captain John Smith's Description of New England. (For immigrants headed toward a largely uncharted land, we may suppose that the latter book was as carefully read as the former.) We know, too, that in the very first days of colonization each minister was given ten pounds with which to start a religious library. And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. (The literacy rate for
<p align=justify>
[32]
<p align=justify>
women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.) It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was "God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Of course, the business of the Gospel may be driven forward in books other than the Bible, as for example in the famous <i>Bay Psalm Book</i>, printed in 1640 and generally regarded as America's first best seller. But it is not to be assumed that these people confined their reading to religious matters. Probate records indicate that 60 percent of the estates in Middlesex County between the years 1654 and 1699 contained books, all but 8 percent of them including more than the Bible. In fact, between 1682 and 1685, Boston's leading bookseller imported 3,421 books from <i>one</i> English dealer, most of these nonreligious books. The meaning of this fact may be appreciated when one adds that these books were intended for consumption by approximately 75,000 people then living in the
northern colonies. The modern equivalent would be ten million books.
<p align=justify>
Aside from the fact that the religion of these Calvinist Puritans demanded that they be literate, three other factors account for the colonists' preoccupation with the printed word. Since the male literacy rate in seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40 percent, we may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England came from more literate areas of England or from more literate segments of the population, or both." In other words, they came here as readers and were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onward almost all New England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading and writing" school, the large communities being required to maintain a grammar school, as well. In all such laws, reference is made to Satan, whose evil designs, it was supposed, could be
<p align=justify>
[33]
<p align=justify>
thwarted at every turn by education. But there were other reasons why education was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in the seventeenth century:
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
<i>
From public schools shall general<br>
knowledge flow,<br>
For 'tis the people's sacred<br>
right to know.
</i>
</font>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
These people, in other words, had more than the subjection of Satan on their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. "More than any other device," Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, "the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; . . . print made a greater impression than actual events. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning." In light of this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood
by the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative. (The England from which they came was an island of schools. By 1660, for example, there were 444 schools in
England, one school approximately every twelve miles.) And it is clear that growth in literacy was closely connected to schooling. Where schooling was not required (as in Rhode Island) or weak school laws prevailed (as in New Hampshire), literacy rates increased more slowly than elsewhere.
</blockquote>
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<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[50]
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Whenever language is the principal medium of communication—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result.
</mark>
The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one's thought. Though one may accomplish it from time to time, it is very hard to say nothing when employing a written English sentence. What else is exposition good for? Words have very little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning. The shapes of written words are not especially interesting to look at. Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell. As a consequence a language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print.
<p align=justify>
It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentally rational activity.
<p align=justify>
[51]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality
</mark>
; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
a certain distance
</mark>
from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
isolated and impersonal
</mark>
text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.
<p align=justify>
I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce
illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes
when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br><br>
...
<br><br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[75] It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the
<p align=justify>
[76]
<p align=justify>
crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head:
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.
</mark>
The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television
game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?
</blockquote>
<p>
<font face="Times New Roman">
Well, exactly. What is omitted here is that the need for diversion, this need itself, was also ascendant at this time; it could even be argued that it was the <i>dominant</i> emergent lifeway issue of this time.
</font>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In <i>The Image</i>, Boorstin calls the major creation of the graphic revolution the "pseudo-event," by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—like the press conference, say. I mean to suggest here that a more significant legacy of the telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo-context. A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use. But the use the pseudo-context provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives. And that, of course, is to amuse. The pseudo-context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.
<p align=justify>
Of course, photography and telegraphy did not strike down at one blow the vast edifice that was typographic culture. The habits of exposition, as I have tried to show, had a long history, and they held powerful sway over the minds of turn-of-the-century Americans. In fact, the early decades of the twentieth century were marked by a great outpouring of brilliant language and
<p align=justify>
[77]
<p align=justify>
literature. In the pages of magazines like the <i>American Mercury</i> and <i>The New Yorker</i>, in the novels and stories of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and even in the columns of the newspaper giants—the <i>Herald Tribune</i>, the <i>Times</i>—prose thrilled with a vibrancy and intensity that delighted ear and eye.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
But this was exposition's nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the moment of death.
</mark>
It told, for the Age of Exposition, not of new beginnings, but of an end. Beneath its dying melody, a new note had been sounded, and photography and telegraphy set the key. Theirs was a "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence. Theirs was a duet of image and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br><br>
...
<br><br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[107]
<!--
Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for
-->
in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called <i>disinformation</i>
</mark>
. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Disinformation does not mean false information.
</mark>
<mark style="color: lightgrey; background-color: green">
It means misleading information
</mark>
—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.
<!--
And in saying that the television news show
entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be
-->
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br><br><br>
</p>
<p align=justify>
[109] Many of the President's "misstatements" fall in the category of contradictions—mutually exclusive assertions that cannot possibly both, in the same context, be true. "In the same context" is the key phrase here, for it is context that defines contradiction. There is no problem in someone's remarking that he prefers oranges to apples, and also remarking that he prefers apples to oranges—not if one statement is made in the context of choosing a wall-paper design and the other in the context of selecting fruit for dessert. In such a case, we have statements that are opposites, but not contradictory. But if the statements are made in a single, continuous, and coherent context, then they are contradictions, and cannot both be true.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[137] We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it
requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—<i>something</i> within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
</blockquote>
<p>
<font face="Times New Roman">
Well,
<br><br>
what if the world
<br>
is
<br>
actually
</font>
<br><br>
dis-
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
organized
</mark>
<br><br>
<font face="Times New Roman">
and
</font>
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
patterns
</mark>
<font face="Times New Roman">
are
<br>
illusory?
</font>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present. "History," Henry Ford said, "is bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist." History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[139] Thus, Orwell envisioned that (1) government control over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.) Orwell was, in effect, addressing himself to a problem of the Age of Print—in fact, to the same problem
addressed by the men who wrote the United States Constitution.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
The Constitution was composed at a time when most free men had access to their communities through a leaflet, a newspaper or the spoken word.
</mark>
They were quite well positioned to share their political ideas with each other in forms and contexts over which they had competent control. Therefore, their greatest worry was the possibility of government tyranny. The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government trom restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America. I raise no strong objection to this fact (at least not here) and have no intention of launching into a standard-brand complaint against the corporate state. I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he Wrote:
<p align=justify>
[140]
<p align=justify>
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch. . . .
</font>
</blockquote>
Earlier in the same essay, Gerbner said:
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast
majority will not turn off. If we don't get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.
</font>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
I do not think Professor Gerbner meant to imply in these sentences that there is a conspiracy to take charge of our symbolic world by the men who run the "Ministry of Culture." I even suspect he would agree with me that if the faculty of the Annenberg School of Communication were to take over the three networks, viewers would hardly notice the difference. I believe he means to say—and in any case, I do—that
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
in the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different
from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
For example, I would venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian opposition to the banning of books from school libraries and from school curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians from confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of new technologies.
<p align=justify>
[141]
<p align=justify>
To put it plainly,
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
a student's freedom to read is not seriously injured by someone's banning a book on Long Island or in Anaheim or anyplace else. But as Gerbner suggests, television clearly does impair the student's freedom to read,
</mark>
and it does so with innocent hands, so to speak. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them.
<p align=justify>
The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue which was largely won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian.
</mark>
It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and
noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.
<p align=justify>
Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Censorship
</mark>
, after all,
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment—and cares.
</mark>
How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all
political discourse takes the form of a jest.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[143] We now know that
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
"Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street."
</mark>
Which is to say, we now know that "Sesame Street" undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Whereas a classroom is a place of social interaction, the space in front of a television set is a private preserve.
</mark>
Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching television is an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teacher at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen. Whereas to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no concept of public decorum. Whereas in a classroom, fun is never more than a means to an end, on television it is the end in itself.
<p align=justify>
Yet "Sesame Street" and its progeny, "The Electric Company," are not to be blamed for laughing the traditional classroom out of existence. If the classroom now begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning, the inventors of television itself are to blame, not the Children's Television Workshop. We can hardly expect those who want to make good television shows to concern themselves with what the classroom is for. They are concerned with what television is for. This
<p align=justify>
[144]
<p align=justify>
does not mean that "Sesame Street" is not educational. It is, in fact, nothing but educational—in the sense that every television show is educational. Just as reading a book—any kind of book—promotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does the same.
"The Little House on the Prairie," "Cheers" and "The Tonight Show" are as effective as "Sesame Street" in promoting what might be called the television style of learning. And this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been called book-learning or its hand-
maiden, school-learning.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
If we are to blame "Sesame Street" for anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the classroom. That, after all, has been its chief claim on foundation and public money. As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
Moreover, it is important to add that whether or not "Sesame Street" teaches children their letters and numbers is entirely irrelevant. We may take as our guide here John Dewey's observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in <i>Experience and Education</i>: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes . . . may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future." In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what
television-viewing requires of them. And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.
<p align=justify>
<!--
Although one would not know it from consulting various re-
cent proposals on how to mend the educational system, this
point--that reading books and watching television differ en-
-->
...
<br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
[146]
<p align=justify>
Having devoted an earlier book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity, to a detailed examination of the antagonistic nature of the two curriculums—television and school—I will not burden the reader or myself with a repetition of that analysis. But I would like to recall two points that I feel I did not express forcefully enough in that book and that happen to be central to this one. I
refer, first, to the fact that television's principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable. This entirely original conception is to be
found nowhere in educational discourses, from Confucius to Plato to Cicero to Locke to John Dewey. In searching the literature of education, you will find it said by some that children will learn best when they are interested in what they are learning. You will find it said—Plato and Dewey emphasized this—that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. <!--
Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories. Indeed, Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present, which cannot be pleasurable for those, like the young, who are struggling
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br><br>
...
<br><br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[161]
<!--
phrase. For
-->
no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell. To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined.
<mark style="color: green; background-color: lightgrey">
Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.
</mark>
<!--
<p align=justify>
In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? There are only two answers that come to mind, one of which is nonsense and can be dismissed almost at once; the other is desperate but it is all we have. The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies,
along the lines of "Saturday Night Live" and "Monty Python,
-->
</blockquote>
<br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>***lasch sport***</h5>
Neil Postman
<i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>
(1984)
[16] <i>"we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do. The trouble
</i>[17]<i>
with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself trivial."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***schickel on polling***</h5>
Neil Postman
<i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>
(1984)
[107] <i>"in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. ...I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***lasch on disinformation***</h5>
Neil Postman
<i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>
(1984)
[107] <i>"television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called <i>disinformation</i>. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>
***descaling***
</h5>
Neil Postman
<i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>
(1984)
[161] <i>"no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. ... Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."</i>
(<a href="
">more</a>)
-->Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-85667582434318826442024-03-02T15:33:00.000-08:002024-03-02T15:33:11.215-08:00Amy Kiste Nyberg—Seal of Approval<br>
<p>
Amy Kiste Nyberg
<br>
<i>Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code</i>
<br>
(1998)
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[38]
<!--
sors of city officials. It warned that it would be difficult to restrain such
officials from extending censorship to other media. It concluded: "For in.
stance, wouldn't it be the next logical step for such censors to forbid the
sale to minors of newspapers carrying news stories of crime? Censorship
breeds censorship!" ("Censorship of Comics" 36). Not surprisingly, the
comic book industry opposed legislation, using the same argument about
the dangers of censorship and maintaining that industry self-regulation
was the proper course. Henry Schultz, executive director of the industry
trade association, noted that self regulation was the "true and lasting so.
lution." Censorship, he argued,
"can do naught but lead us down a dark
and dangerous road from which there may be no returning" (Schultz, "Cen.
sorship"223-24).
While the ACMP and the comic book industry had seemingly found
allies, most of those who defended comic books against censorship did
not condone the publication of crime and horror comic books. In fact, if
there had been a way to assure such groups that censorship laws would be
limited to comic books, they no doubt would have thrown their support
wholeheartedly behind such legislation. This conclusion is reflected in
the fact that decency crusades in local communities were praised by the
very same people who opposed censorship laws. In many ways, the de-
cency crusades were a more insidious form of censorship, since there was
no legal recourse against such actions.
Decency crusades, however, had their greatest impact on retailers and
on the readers whose selection of comic books was dictated by a small
group in the community intent on policing public morality. Such actions
had little impact on the industry. Of more concern to publishers, however,
was the work of legislators who sought laws to control or ban the publica-
tion of comics. The threat of legislation directly affected the economic
well-being of the comic book publishing industry. A major hurdle, how-
ever, was the constitutionality of any legal remedies targeting comic books.
-->
The legal case of most concern to those drafting state and federal legislation against comic books was a case that dealt, not with a comic book, but an adult crime magazine, <i>Headquarters Detective, True Cases from the Police Blotter</i>. Two thousand copies of the magazine were seized in New York under a section of the New York Penal Code that made it illegal to publish, distribute, or sell any book, pamphlet, magazine, or newspaper made up primarily of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime. The
<p align=justify>
[39]
<p align=justify>
book dealer was convicted, but after more than seven years of litigation, lower court decisions were reversed by the United States Supreme Court on March 29, I948, on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional. Similar statutes in eighteen states were overturned by the decision in <i>Winters v. New York</i>.
<p align=justify>
The Supreme Court found the laws prohibiting depiction of crime and violence in the media unconstitutional as written, since they violated both the First and Fourteenth amendments. Although obscenity and pornography were not protected under the First Amendment, the Court ruled that crime magazines, while containing little of value to society, were as much entitled to free speech protection as the best of literature. The Court also noted that while words such as obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, or disgusting were "well understood through long use in criminal law," the provisions against crime and bloodshed were unconstitutionally vague because the clause had no "technical or common law meaning." Without a precise definition, it was impossible for an individual to know when he or she was in violation of the law. Therefore, the New York law was also in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing due process.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Gerson Legman, speaking before the Association for the Advancement
of Psychotherapy as part of a symposium on comic books organized by
Fredric Wertham, noted that the Winters decision would make it difficult
to pass legislation against comic books. Legman interpreted the Supreme
Court decision to mean the court had separated obscenity from violence
and ruled that the latter had constitutional protection. He commented
that it was hypocritical that after looking at hundreds of pictures in comic
books showing half-naked women being tortured to death, critics could
only complain that the women were half naked. He added, "If they were
being tortured to death with all their clothes on, that would be perfect for
children" (476).
-->
<p align=justify>
The Supreme Court's decision in 1948 set guidelines for media content that are still at issue today. Laws regulating obscenity and pornography are on the books in almost every city and state, but the regulation of violent content in the media, while it spurs periodic public outcry and legislative investigation, ultimately remains the responsibility of the media industries and their self-regulatory bodies.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[93]
<!--
Delaware school children and concluded that segregated school systems
were psychologically harmful (Wertham, "Nine Men" 497). Wertham's tes-
timony in 1951 was a major factor in the decision to outlaw school segre-
gation in Delaware, and his research and testimony in the Delaware cases
became part of the legal argument used in the landmark school desegre-
gation case, Brown v Board of Education of Topeka (Reibman 15).
Although his next major attack on comic books in the popular press
did not come until 1953, Wertham remained active in the battle against
comic books. The 1948 articles had stimulated an interest in legislation
against comic books at the state, local, and national levels, and Wertham
was called upon to give expert testimony. He spoke several times before the
New York Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics,
formed in March 1949 to make recommendations about legislation (see
chap. 2). Wertham also convinced Sen. Estes Kefauver, head of the Special
Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime, to investigate the comic
book industry. The results failed to provide strong evidence of a relation-
ship between comic books and delinquency, and the Kefauver committee
dropped its inquiry into comic books (see chap. 3). Wertham denounced
the "Kefauver-Dewey charter" that he felt had granted the comic book in-
dustry the right to print whatever it wanted without regulation or control
(Seduction 389). Discouraged by this lack of action on the part of state and
federal lawmakers, Wertham again turned to the popular press as a forum
for his views about comic books. He collected his articles and lectures de-
scribing his research on the effects of comic book violence into a book-
length study and Rinehart and Company agreed to publish it. Seduction of
the Innocent was released in 1954.
-->
<i>[Fredric]</i> Wertham's book, while it drew on his research, was not intended to be a scholarly presentation of his ideas. He used his book as a vehicle to make his case against comics in hopes he could once again mobilize public opinion in support of his proposed ban on the sale of comic books to children. The book was not an objective overview of the comic book industry but a deliberately sensationalized portrait of the worst that comic books had to offer.
<!--
The chapter titles, the illustrations and the stories drawn from his
case studies were intentionally provocative. For example, chapter seven,
Fredric Wertham and the Comics Crusade
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
I find it perplexing that this claim of intention (or perhaps the <i>lack</i> of intention to be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
scholarly
</mark>) would ever be seriously made by an academic, whether on their own or anothers' behalf. I can't imagine it is accepted as readily as it is made, but it does survive the editorial process from time to time, as here and a few other places which I've previously noticed but neglected to record.
<p>
Nyberg elsewhere makes it clear that both reformers and Wertham himself traded on his imposing credentials. Putting the burden on readers (a) to make an inference about the degree to which such an author intends to be "scholarly," and (b) to gracefully conduct an <i>as-if</i> reading according to this inference, this seems a bit much to ask.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[94]
<!--
"Crime Detective Comics" showing a psychiatrist bound and gagged as
his office is being robbed. Wertham's caption; "Caricature of the author
in a position comic-book publishers wish he were in permanently." And
the narrative is supplemented with the kinds of anecdotal evidence drawn
from his case studies and other reports that had proved so effective in ear-
lier magazine articles.
Wertham's first goal was to alert parents to the fact that crime and hor-
tor comics existed and were read by children. He began his book by not-
ing that the comic book industry gained a hold with its crime and horror
comics before parents and others were aware of the shift in content. By
the time the issue of harm was raised, Wertham suggested, "the conquest
of American childhood by the industry was already an accomplished fact"
(Seduction 220). He argued that the problem of crime comics was too wide-
spread to be handled on an individual basis. The problem was a social
one and children needed help, not at the family level, but on a larger
scale. Such reasoning supported Wertham's call for legislation.
Wertham also shared some of the cultural elitism of the Frankfurt School
in his rejection of the suggestion that comic books were a form of children's
culture that could be likened to fairy tales or figures from folklore. "Comic
books have nothing to do with drama, with art or literature," Wertham
wrote. In fact, echoing earlier critics, Wertham believed that comic books
prevented children from developing an appreciation for good literature. If
fed a diet of stories in which the solution to all problems is "simple, di-
rect, mechanical and violent," children will be unable to advance to more
complex works that cannot be reduced to the elements of a comic book
plot, he argued (Seduction 241).
-->
While Wertham's main concern was violence, he also studied the way race and gender were depicted in comic books. In a discussion of the "jungle" comic books, Wertham wrote that while the white people in these comics were blond, athletic, and shapely, the natives were usually portrayed as subhuman or even ape-like. Such portrayals, where the heroes were always "blond Nordic supermen," made a deep impression on children. Wertham noted that such images acted to reinforce attitudes of prejudice at the individual level, but they also worked at the
<p align=justify>
[95]
<p align=justify>
broader social level, labeling as "minorities" what really constituted "the majority of mankind." Children, he argued, were presented with two
kinds of people: one is the tall, blond, regular-featured man or pretty young
blonde girl, and the others fall into the broad category of inferior people.
The social meaning attached to such representations becomes clear, according to Wertham, when children are asked to identify the villain in a story
and invariably choose the character who is nonwhite, of an identifiable
ethnic background, or one who in some other way deviates from the norm.
Children take for granted these standards about race; in other words,
such representations become normalized. And where nudity was found in
comics, it was generally nonwhite women who are portrayed this way. ...
<!--
Noted Wertham: "It is probably one of the most sinister methods of sug-
gesting that races are fundamentally different with regard to moral values,
and that one is inferior to the other. This is where a psychiatric question
becomes a social one' (105).
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The issue of gender is linked to violence in Wertham's study, since
women are generally victims in comic books. Wertham believed the blend-
ing of sensuality with cruelty was a particularly disturbing aspect of comic
book ideology that had a great deal of resonance with the disdain for the
opposite sex that young male readers often had. In many comic books,
women were portrayed as objects to be abused or to be used as decoys in
crime settings. Women who did not fall into the role of victim were gen-
erally cast as villains, often with masculine or witchlike powers. These plots
suggested that men had to present a united front against such women.
Wertham commented, "In these stories there are practically no decent,
attractive, successful women" (19r). Wertham also objected to the genre
known as romance or love comics. Such comics moved from the realm of
physical violence against women to psychological violence in which the
main female character is often humiliated or shown to be inadequate in
some way.
-->
<p align=justify>
Wertham's ideological analysis, while relatively unsophisticated, would not be out of place in the company of media scholarship today that addresses many of these same issues.
<!--
Another area in which Wertham might be considered a pioneer is that of audience analysis. The "clinical" method of taking lengthy case histories based on interviews with subjects has parallels in the field of anthropology, where researchers investigating culture conduct extensive field interviews. The ethnographic methods of anthropology have been adopted by some modern media scholars as a way to Fredric Wertham and the Comics Crusade 95
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
No kidding!
<p>
Eventually, the purportedly far more
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sophisticated
</mark>
Social Psychologists started
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ask</mark>ing
<i>adults</i> the same questions, and purportedly they got the same answers. So, adults are as impressionable as children were once thought to be, and/or <i>the media</i> are an even smaller piece of the puzzle than we thought, and/or anything and everything is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
prejudice</mark>d
in some direction or other and this always manifests in some measurable way.
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[96]
<!--
study media audiences, and in many ways, Wertham was engaging in sim-
illar research. He was interested in talking with a large number of children
in an effort to discover how they made meaning out of this cultural prod-
uct and the way they used comic books in their everyday lives.
Of course, as noted before, by the time Wertham wrote Seduction of the
Innocent, his agenda was clearly defined and his book was meant to serve
that agenda. Therefore, the material presented from conversations with
children, rather than being analyzed in any systematic way, was carefully
selected to support Wertham's conclusions about comic books, and the
dialogue he quotes seems quite contrived. This type of audience study,
where researchers analyze what readers or viewers say, introduces a differ-
ent set of interpretive problems that Wertham never acknowledged and
probably never recognized. Even so, his Insistence that the effects of comic
books could be best understood by analyzing how the readers themselves
made sense of what they were reading suggests that on one level, Wertham
rejected the theoretical perspective he is accused of perpetrating--that
the readers were passive consumers.
-->
One assertion that Wertham made about his readers was that they did not remember entire stories, but only fragments, so the claims by publishers that the criminals always got caught and punished in the end was empty reassurance. Wertham offered this young boy's summary of the stories he liked: "They have a lot of girls in them. There is a lot of fighting in them. There are men and women fighting. Sometimes they kill the girls, they strangle them, shoot them. Sometimes they poison them. In the magazine <i>Jumbo</i>, they often stab them. The girl doesn't do the stabbing very often, she gets stabbed more often." In another example, Wertham cited a comic featuring Hopalong Cassidy in which a barber threatens another man with a razor and Hopalong Cassidy attacks the barber and saves the man. Comments Wertham; "I have talked to children about this book. They do not say this book is about the West, or Hopalong Cassidy, or about a barber. They say it is about killing and socking people and twisting their arms and cutting their throats."
<!--
One way in which Wertham asserted comic books did have a direct in-
fluence on children was the way in which children made use of comics in
their everyday lives by imitating the criminal acts they saw in comic books.
He wrote: "Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily
translated into the rifling of a candy store" (25). He devoted a great deal
of time to discussing examples of such acts of imitation. While this might
96 Fredric Wertham and the Comics Crusade
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[159]
<!--
accessful (and profitabi
sNorestful land @ inectand. Irve Ilih eand established companies prefer tà
-. ce supernero has been a
somain with the tried and true. Jather than take risks with more into a
jive material. This fact is typical of media producers in general, not JUSt
comic book publishers,
<p align=justify>
"Wuch more damaging to the creative development of the comic boOk
han the restrictions on crime and horror comics was the code's insistence
inhat all comics published adhere to a rigid value structure that forbid any
challenge to authority. Under the 195A comics code, there was a unified
view in the world of comic books, one in which social institutions and
authority figures were always benign in their concern with upholding tra-
ditional values and in which rebellion against the "establishment" was
nearly impossible. Without the freedom to question the status quo, comic
book content remained for the most part quite innocuous. This innocu-
ousness was not an issue with most critics, who rejected the notion that
comic books could contribute to any meaningful exchange of ideas.
-->
One of the few groups to speak out for the potential of comic books was the American Civil Liberties Union. They actually favored legislation over industry regulation. The group argued in a pamphlet published in 1955 that <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
postpublication punishment
</mark>
based on
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
laws
</mark>
at least allowed for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the due process of law and a jury
</mark>
that reflected a community's taste.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Prior censorship
</mark>
, in the form of a
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
prepublication review process
</mark>
,
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
concentrated power
</mark>
in the hands of the few with
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
no legal recourse
</mark>
. Industry codes, the ACLU argued, inevitably have the effect of inhibiting the free expression of ideas: "Collective adherence to a single set of principles in a code has the effect of limiting different points of view, because individual
publishers—as well as writers—are fearful of departing from the accepted norm lest they be held up to scorn or attack and suffer economic loss."
<!--
<p align=justify>
But publishers in the r9sos had little interest in protecting comic books
as a medium of self-expression. Their motivations were primarily economic.
Since the beginning, comic book publishing had focused on production,
not creation. In the early days of comic books, companies did not hire
their own writers and artists. Instead, they contracted with a number of
shops set up to provide creative services to the publishers. Writers and
artists churned out pages of material in a factory system in which each
The Significance of the Code Today 159
-->
</blockquote>
<p>
(The pamphlet is online <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015001367831&view=1up&seq=1">here</a>.)
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[162]
<!--
are not nearly as large now tharence enacialspores pharwinsaness, and
many have predicted that a number of specialty stores operating on an al.
ready slim profit margin will eventually be driven out of business. Per.
haps less obvious is the impact on the creative growth of the medium.
There are, operating in the margins of the industry, individuals who self-
publish. Until now, these individuals could sometimes persuade a distrib.
utor to offer their titles through the direct market, even though sales would
be insignificant compared to the titles published by the larger companies.
One example is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, creators of the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles, a title that began as a small self-published comic but
went on to become one of the industry's best known success stories. While
one could argue that Eastman and Laird's success had little impact on the
creative growth of the medium, it does demonstrate the possibilities when
non-mainstream material is allowed access to an audience. But Diamond
has little incentive to offer such marginal titles to its retail outlets, effec-
tively shutting out the smaller creator from the distribution system. While
comic book conventions and mail-order distribution are alternatives for
these publishers, wider dissemination of their work is nearly impossible
without support from the distributors.
-->
...the fan backlash <i>[against </i>"manipulative marketing techniques"<i>]</i> has resulted in a decease in sales on titles whose circulation numbers were artificially inflated by the marketing gimmicks employed by publishers. This downturn has renewed the industry's interest in opening up new markets for comic books. One attempt to market outside fandom was the "creation" of the graphic novel. In the late 1980s, the publication of three titles—<i>Maus, Batman
Returns,</i> and <i>Watchmen</i>—caught the fancy of the mainstream press, and
journalists unfamiliar with the industry heralded them "as constituting a new and historically unique trend." Publishers capitalized on this notion of a "new breed" of comics to cultivate a new outlet for comics: bookstores. But as comics attempted to make the transition from "comics culture" to "book culture," the "graphic" element of the graphic novel was left behind. As Sabin notes,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
graphic novels
</mark>
were reviewed in
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
book sections
</mark>
,
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
writers
</mark>
were profiled rather than
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
artists
</mark>
, and the
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
quality of writing
</mark>
was held in higher esteem than the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
quality of artwork
</mark>
. In short, the co-option of comic books by literary interests was doomed to failure because, as Sabin writes, "it served to remake comics in prose literature's image." The bookstores' interest waned and graphic novels began to
disappear from shelves.
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[165]
<h3>
Association of Comics Magazine Publishers
<br>
Comics Code
<br>
1948
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
6. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.
<p align=justify>
...
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[166]
<h3>
...
<br>
1954
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[167]
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
General Standards Part C
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
DIALOGUE
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
RELIGION
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
COSTUME
<br>
...
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
[168]
<p align=justify>
4. Females should be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.
<p align=justify>
...
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[170]
<h3>
...
<br>
1971
</h3>
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
[173]
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
General Standards—Part C
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
DIALOGUE
<br>
...
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
RELIGION
<p align=justify>
1. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
COSTUME
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
2. Females should be drawn realistically without undue emphasis on any physical quality.
<p align=justify>
...
</blockquote>
<p>
<br><br>
<br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[175]
<h3>
...
<br>
1989
</h3>
<p align=justify>
PREAMBLE
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
INSTITUTIONS
<p align=justify>
In general recognizable national, social, political, cutural, ethnic and racial groups, religious institutions, and law enforcement authorities will be potrayed in a positive light. These include... <i>[...a very long list...]</i>
<p align=justify>
[176]
<p align=justify>
...; and social groups identifiable by lifestyle, such as homosexuals, the economically disadvantaged, the economically privileged, the homeless, senior citizens, minors, etc.
</blockquote>
<p>
Nothing against any of these people of course, but, uh...anybody for <i>ontological nominalism</i>??
<br><br>
</p>
<blockquote>
If, for dramatic purposes,
</blockquote>
<p>
...this qualification appears a few times in this version of the Code...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
it is necessary to portray such group of individuals in a negative manner, the name of the group and its individual members will be fictitious, and its activities will not be clearly identifiable with the routine activities of any real group.
<p align=justify>
...
<p align=justify>
LANGUAGE
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
VIOLENCE
<br>
...
<p align=justify>
CHARACTERIZATIONS
<p align=justify>
Character portrayals will be carefully crafted and show sensitivity to national, ethnic, religious, sexual, political and socioeconomic orientations.
<p align=justify>
[177]
<p align=justify>
If it is dramatically appropriate for one character to demean another because of his or her sex, ethnicity, religion,..., the demeaning words or actions will be clearly shown to be wrong or ignorant in the course of the story. ...
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
Well, faced with that dubious prescription, Wertham does have the necessary rejoinder after all:
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
<i>
"
<br>
I have talked to children about this book.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
They do not say
<br>
this book
<br>
is about
<br>
the West,
<br>
or Hopalong Cassidy,
<br>
or about a barber.
<p style="margin-left: 25%">
They say
<br>
it
<br>
is about
<br>
killing
<br>
and socking people
<br>
and twisting their arms
<br>
and cutting their throats.
<br>
"
</i>
</p>
<p>
Eventually, if they haven't already started, researchers will have to start
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
talk</mark>ing
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
to
</mark>
people about entertainment in the wake of Wokism. Perhaps they'll be told that it is about beautiful people using supernatural powers to perform mundane tasks.
</p>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***lit imp***
</h5>
Amy Kiste Nyberg
<i>Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code</i>
(1998)
[162] <i>"One attempt to market </i>[comics]<i> outside fandom was the "creation" of the graphic novel. In the late 1980s,...three titles...caught the fancy of the mainstream press, and journalists unfamiliar with the industry heralded them "as constituting a new and historically unique trend." Publishers capitalized on this notion of a "new breed" of comics to cultivate a new outlet for comics: bookstores. But as comics attempted to make the transition from "comics culture" to "book culture," the "graphic" element of the graphic novel was left behind. ...graphic novels were reviewed in book sections, writers were profiled rather than artists, and the quality of writing was held in higher esteem than the quality of artwork. In short, the co-option of comic books by literary interests was doomed to failure because, as Sabin writes, "it served to remake comics in prose literature's image." The bookstores' interest waned and graphic novels began to disappear from shelves."</i>
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***simple link to https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2022/06/john-wertheimermutual-film-reviewed.html***
</h5>
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-2172921755314607762024-03-01T10:29:00.000-08:002024-03-01T10:29:18.299-08:00Fallacies Intentional and Unintentional<br>
<p>
This is my Goodreads review of <i>The War on Music</i> by John Mauceri. It turned into more of a summation of everything I've been churning over for the past several years.
<br><br><br>
</p>
<hr>
<p>
Scattered amongst the howlers is a story that deserves to be told. Two stars for that story, zero for its rendering here.
<p>
This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the
<a href="
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
">
bullshit asymmetry principle
</a>
.
</p>
<center>
+=+=+=+
</center>
<p>
There are some notes and citations at the end, but really this is a polemical work and not a scholarly one. It is a mad dash on the hamster wheel for Mauceri, who repeatedly stakes out some patch of moral high-ground only to tell on himself later. Even the digression on sour liner notes is recapitulated when, in the acknowledgments, he says, "Many peers have read this manuscript, some of whom were enraged. ... What was hated—and why—taught me a great deal." One can only hope. But for now he has merely doubled down, as any polemicist must.
<p>
The first tell: he finds it "ironic that Hanslick's anti-futurist conservative philosophy was subsequently taken up by the modernists of the twentieth century." There shouldn't be any irony in this for someone who is willing to dispense with the myth of progress and the top-down critical diktats that perpetuate it, nor for someone who maintains that "Human nature—why we make and listen to music, and how we perceive sound—does not change." The fluidity of radical and reactionary positions over time is an old story. Ditto the cyclical threads of history generally. This could be because "human nature" is a bounded diversity rather than a predictable formula. Mauceri's attempt to reduce "how we perceive sound" to just such a formula is embarrassing and undercooked. His definition of "anti-aesthetic" as "not tonal and not sounding like a continuity of the past" wouldn't pass muster in a freshman seminar. Someone (perhaps an "enraged" reader of an early draft) has impressed upon him the need to signal his awareness of something called "the intentional fallacy," but he is quite willing to commit this fallacy even so. I could continue a long list of howlers, but I stopped logging them because there were too many.
<p>
Suffice it to say that the unexpected reappearance of the "absolute music" subtrend becomes "ironic" only after it is given a genetic, top-down explanation and an ultimate test (the Wisdom of Crowds) which it is bound to fail. "Movies," in contrast, "can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people's minds," that is, what it was doing even before the advent of self-conscious "program music" or the invention of cinematic technology. I think this latter approach is generally the right one. I am unsure why it can be applied to the meat of the "human nature" bell curve but not to the tails.
<p>
I am not here to promote twelve-tone music. I don't listen to much of it. I do think that the high-modernist conceit to "absolute" or "pure" art has always contained within itself a populist antithesis, and that this still, now, has not been properly reckoned with. If we're more sporting towards Hanslick and/or the Modernists, we might venture that, like those early program music composers he so detested, Hanslick was already onto a few things that had implications far beyond what he, in his time, was able to imagine. Forget Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, I'm talking about Augustine (<i>"Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin"</i>), <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/704004.Art_and_Artist">Otto Rank</a> (<i>"arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator...is a fallacy"</i>), <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1313575.Art_and_Technics">Lewis Mumford</a> ("<i>to have the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose is the essence of morality"</i>), <a href="
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52374.Against_Interpretation_and_Other_Essays">Susan Sontag</a> (<i>"The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience immediately what we have"</i>), and especially <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/386885.The_True_and_Only_Heaven">Christopher Lasch</a> (<i>"The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want"</i>).
<p>
Self-styling and storytelling are not right for every time and place. It is possible to have too much of them. Most people say they do want these things, lots of them, always and everywhere; yet sometimes it is obvious that this is not what they need; and if not then someone else has to be the one to tell them. When the more powerful make such declarations to the less powerful, this evinces "elitism." This is an unfortunate wrong turn that many avant-gardists have taken. This charge of "elitism" misleads many observers, however, into an overcorrection towards that good old <i>"liberal principle"</i> of rational self-interest, at which point, just as Lasch feared, no one can criticize or make demands on anyone else. But really it is the people around us, our nonelite peers and relations, who are our most able and most just critics. Because they have some skin in the game and a view from the outside, they usually know us better than we know ourselves. This is a core finding both of classic psychoanalysis and modern social psychology. When our story doesn't add up, they are first to notice. We should want them to tell us.
<p>
On this point, here is a genuine irony: Mauceri resents music becoming "a pawn in the chess game of politics" yet he is pleased that "music has always had a narrative propensity." He breezes along as if these were different things. Really, the first can't happen without the second. What is the politicization of music but the accretion at scale of many individual stories people tell themselves? Because the 2010s and 2020s have seen music and art getting politicized in new and insidious ways, a book such as this might have at least made mention of that unfortunate reality and pointed out parallels (or the lack of them) with prior history. In any case, it's not hard to see why the conceit to "absolute music" would be attractive, if not as a viable countervailing force then at least as a symbolic gesture of abstention from today's faux-activist clown show.
<p>
Another irony, then, (if it is not simply a self-contradiction), is that Mauceri ends up more than halfway to an "absolute music" platform despite unfurling a series of platitudes in favor of the "narrative propensity." "In some respects," he writes, World War II "is a war that never seems to have ended." "Hostilities" evince merely "a euphemism to represent armies standing down," for they "clearly continued—and will continue as long as there is memory." He is banking on the cleansing effect of time to wash away those memories: "Perhaps the simple answer to this complicated story is; play the music." <i>Bravo, Maestro!</i> But the mere assumption that this is possible cuts against any simple parallelism between composition and reception.
<p>
And finally, the big tell: this is a leap he is prepared to make only when it serves his polemic, and otherwise not. With Stockhausen, e.g., the simple parallelism carries the day. "Look carefully at a photo of Cologne in 1945 and imagine a motherless seventeen-year-old," surrounded by devastation and "self-punitive architecture that was being constructed" amongst the recovery effort. "The horrors of war made beauty inappropriate," hence "this dissonant music is redolent of loss." With Respighi, meanwhile, the simple parallelism is nowhere to be found. Even before the first World War, Respighi "was already composing exactly what Mussolini wanted." How or why is not mentioned. Respighi thus never joined the Fascist party because he "did not need to." His music was able to enter the fringes of the canon while so much else was suppressed after the war. Very interesting developments here, but somehow not interesting enough to warrant "looking carefully" at teen Respighi's architectural habitat or his parental situation. Stockhausen's music merely reflects his life experience while Respighi's music transcends his. We are to remember one biography and forget the other. Why should that be?
<p>
Anyway, "perhaps now that you know this story" of Stockhausen's early life, "you will open your ears to what he left us." Perhaps. But elsewhere Mauceri's aim (which I endorse) is to dethrone precisely this kind of insider trading. "Ask most people about art, especially classical music, and you will get something like, "I really don't know anything about it." Here's the secret—you know everything you need to know about it." <i>Bravo, Maestro!</i> But if listeners already "know everything they need to know," then what's with the "motherless seventeen-year-old" bit?
<p>
There are plenty of people around today, both young and old, who would not go near anything that was "exactly what Mussolini wanted." If they were told that any old minor dictator had used toilet paper, they would want to stop. Of course this is absurd, and so is Mauceri's reaction to conducting Stravisky's <i>Sacre</i>. At one juncture, he claims to feel that "part of me is committing a violent murderous act, while another part of me feels as if I am literally being hit eleven times." This is how he "feels" during a made-up piece of music written around a made-up story. This is supposed to be another illustration of "the eternal adolescence of the avant-garde" which they themselves are bound to outgrow: "I never wished to go there or be that person again—and, it should be said, neither did the composer." What it really shows is that there were millennial snowflakes long before the turn of the millennium.
<br><br>
</p>
<center>
+=+=+=+
</center>
<p>
Here is the money quote from Wimsatt and Beardsley's original paper on "The Intentional Fallacy":
<p>
<i>
"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's... The poem belongs to the public, it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge."
</i>
<p>
Mauceri of course emphasizes the public-as-market, but the market is only one aspect of the broader public order. Artworks <i>"belong to the public"</i> in W+B's sense above whether or not they find success in the market. This includes avant-garde works.
<p>
As I tried to show above, being <i>against</i> elitism in such matters is more straightforward than being <i>for</i> populism. Uncritical acceptance of the Wisdom of Crowds is merely another <i>"form of irresponsibility."</i> The crowd doesn't care about what we need or how much of it. Our peers and relations would have a better idea; but that is a village populism which has become unavailable to many people. By the same token, so-called Cancel Culture shows that the widest market success can be strongly countervailed by the soft power of a much smaller number of people, in which event the artwork-as-market-commodity has ceased to <i>"belong to the public"</i> even in that limited capacity.
<p>
If it seems absurd to apply such deathly serious logic to some offhand remarks about Respighi and Stockhausen, that's because the stakes there are so low. The earth won't fly off of its axis if there were, in fact, other decisive factors in Stockhausen's development besides the ones Mauceri gives, nor if the ones he gives were not actually as decisive as he says. But the artwork now belongs to the critic, who says it belongs to the composer. It no longer belongs to the public, not because of any elitism but because the public order is, as Lasch once put it, <i>impersonal</i>, whereas Mauceri's theory of <i>"the human being"</i> as <i>"an object of public knowledge"</i> varies depending on which human being(s) he is discussing.
<p>
Mauceri notes that "Charles Ives made a distinction between the Unknown and the In-known, the latter being what we profoundly sense but cannot prove or even explain." Even as a strictly private matter, this is a dicey proposition. Human beings are terrible at differentiating perceptions from delusions. (Messrs.
<a href="
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow
">
Kahneman
</a>
and
<a href="
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan
">
Taleb
</a>
have the dirt.) What elitists "profoundly sense" but "cannot prove or even explain" is that the plebes do not, in fact, know everything they need to know about music in order to make sense of it. Racists "profoundly sense but cannot prove" their own ethnic superiority. If we reject these "In-knowns," on what basis can we accept others?
<p>
In order for such propositions to be actionable, the democratic public order generally requires proof. Judges, clients, neighbors and spouses tend to find our "profoundly sensed" inferences somewhat less profound than we ourselves do. Democracy affords <i>expression</i> of the unprovable, but formally it cannot accommodate epistemological anarchy. This is why making art is primary and talking about it is secondary: truly free expression is also "free" of any warranty as to truth, honesty, or sincerity; criticism purportedly belongs to that part of the public order where these things are de rigeur, yet it deals with a subject which may defy all of them, all at once.
<p>
I formulate the problem this way because it suggests that for art to shape the public order prospectively is playing a dangerous game. Of course not only does this happen, but it is often put forward as precisely the mandate of art, especially by activists. That is a curious development of the twentieth (not the nineteeth) century to which "absolute" art is staunchly opposed. Mauceri is opposed to it too, but only sometimes, as when fascists and commies are the culprits, coercing people against their wills. Hollywood gets a free pass because its audiences have been complicit and avid. Yet under Hollywood's influence the public order has fared very badly. It doesn't take an Adorno to see that.
<p>
It's obvious, then, why criticism must be "objective" in order to fulfull its mandate; or if not, then it's unclear what criticism's role is besides giving a platform to a few pompous idiot savants. But here too, all sorts of bizarre rationalizations are put forth for why conjectures ought to be admissable after all. (To be sure, if Stockhausen <i>himself</i> loudly proclaims exactly what Mauceri says here about his biography, he also is making a conjecture.)
<p>
The only thing that can keep this train on the tracks is the periodic <i>force majeure</i> imposition of some greater certainty. The resurfacing of an old manuscript can quickly settle disputes over authorship or priority. But those are simple (often binary) questions. Why an artist made their art is an intractable question. Science has churned away at it for a long time and come up with remarkably little bankable evidence. The ease with which Mauceri resolves it is frankly absurd and, dare I say, a little scary. It shows how little he has learned from the events of which he writes.
<p>
Again, Lasch: <i>"Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order."</i> Similarly, Mumford: <i>"What my friend Matthew Nowicki used to say about architecture—that a great client was essential in the production of a great building—holds for every other form of art."</i> In other words, communities get the art, the criticism and the democracy that they deserve.
<p>
The evidence of observable behavior alone is usually insufficient to explain exactly how we got from client to building, or from polity to law. Meanwhile, efforts to tease out the unobservable factors have been worse than unsatisfying; namely, they have been low in predictive power and high in innuendo. The arts are hardly the only area where such innuendo is on offer, but it's hard to think of another area where it is so readily accepted as fact. We can either stop accepting it or we can pay the price.
<br><br>
</p>
<center>
+=+=+=+
</center>
<p>
I was lent this book by a friend who knows me well enough to presume my interest in the topic but not well enough to anticipate my reaction. As it happens, I was an eager but troubled reader of Kyle Gann's blog throughout the 2000s and 2010s and therefore have long since had my fill of tonal Boomer score-settling. In college I refused to read much of the Grout beyond what I needed to cram for exams, but I did check Hanslick's (in)famous book out of the library and read the whole thing eagerly. It was unmistakably foreign, and it made all the sense in the world. Ditto Cage's <i>Silence</i>, Schoenberg's <i>Style and Idea</i>, some of Robert Schumann's criticism, and a few other things I've since forgotten. These were the first books I ever enjoyed reading, and they were the last ones for a long time. That fact alone indicates that I'm not Mauceri's target audience. But as I get older I've been trying more to give myself over to happenstance, so when I was offered this book and a glowing recommendation, I accepted. You win some, you lose some.
</p>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-37735720830588917972023-10-14T09:53:00.006-07:002023-10-14T09:53:54.335-07:00the bot that put these next to each other might actually be intelligent<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKKkPiqETO8Gtg_Lttl4MzmJkdYCPO0C_h0d14nyhz5cmnThND5Vu1bxthlM2d4kVTYrQXDhxwuyXZFAQgg7_VSJhlVsYG5GBVN4eFqmXh2rIha-NLp6qTgkDFXZ21L0ildhbX_t5rHuTu_ssiYB-W5x4NBPdwcmnOY8FRNwVTx3ckOgzqSMmQaQ/s1792/186D8881-EF3E-4BD0-A6CE-1DE65587562F.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="600" data-original-height="1792" data-original-width="828" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKKkPiqETO8Gtg_Lttl4MzmJkdYCPO0C_h0d14nyhz5cmnThND5Vu1bxthlM2d4kVTYrQXDhxwuyXZFAQgg7_VSJhlVsYG5GBVN4eFqmXh2rIha-NLp6qTgkDFXZ21L0ildhbX_t5rHuTu_ssiYB-W5x4NBPdwcmnOY8FRNwVTx3ckOgzqSMmQaQ/s600/186D8881-EF3E-4BD0-A6CE-1DE65587562F.png"/></a></div>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-74368376599754887372023-09-22T20:27:00.000-07:002023-09-22T20:27:39.175-07:00Prisons of Misprision<br>
<p>
From today's reading, an auspicious juxtaposition, fresh as they come...
<br>
</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p>
Louis Menand
<br>
<i>
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
</i>
<br>
(2021)
<br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<font face=times>
<p align=justify>
[78] The French had their own way of reading American fiction and their own understanding of what it was about. That understanding was partly an effect of translation and partly the consequence of a received idea of Americans. ...
<!--
Almost none of the French writers who were influenced by American fiction had ever been to the United States.
-->
Their knowledge of the American character derived from translated novels and Hollywood movies. (But: misprision is part of transmission.)
<p align=justify>
<i>[Maurice-Edgar]</i> Coindreau taught at Princeton until his retirement, in 1961, but he was, quite self-consciously, a Frenchman. His own politics were reactionary. ...
<!--
He was from a town called La Roche-sur-Yon, which is in the Vendée, in western France, once the heart of royalist and clerical opposition to the French Revolution and Napoléon.
-->
Despite their friendship and the success of <i>Manhattan Transfer</i>, Coindreau declined to translate Dos Passos's <i>U.S.A.</i>, because he didn't like its left-wing politics. The reason he translated so many Southerners was because he identified with them as rebels against the modern liberal state.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Coindreau's reference points as a translator were the major French authors-_Rabelais, Montaigne, Flaubert, Gide.
-->
What interested him in American writing was the technique, not the Americana. He called the problem of translating dialect, for example, "a detail of slight importance." ...
<!--
The country people in Faulkner's novels "speak above all as country people do," he explained, "and nothing else matters. The same reasoning may be applied to Negroes." What matters about Dilsey, "the admirable 'mammy' of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury," is not the color of her skin.
-->
"All men of my generation in France have known in the homes of their parents and their grandparents white counterparts of Dilsey. We know how they spoke and this is the only thing that concerns us." ...
<!--
He advised French readers that the Grand-Guignol plots in Faulkner's novels along with the idiocy, murder, rape, incest, racism, and general depravity—could be ignored. "In the works of William Faulkner the subject is only a pretext for a display of technique," he wrote in his VRF article. ". . . To be fair to Faulkner one must forget his themes and consider only the way he deals with them."
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Gallimard's translators therefore regarded dialect as something they were not obliged to reproduce. "The patois might interest the English-language reader,"
Larbaud explained in his preface to <i>Tandis que
-->
<p align=justify>
[79]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
jaganise</i>, ". . . but it is no more than a degraded English, spoiled by negligence and bad habits, that for us is more impenetrable than colorful."
-->
In one respect, Larbaud and Coindreau were making a virtue of necessity. ...
<!--
For how do you translate American vernacular prose, and particularly American colloquial speech, which is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, into a Romance language like French?
-->
"Dat's de troof" says Job, the old Black man who works in Jason Compson's shop in <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>. Coindreau's rendering: "Ca, c'est bien vrai, dit-il." It's not the same.
<p align=justify>
This meant that French translations of American novels largely bleached out markers of race, region, and class. The effect was to classicize.
<!--
Malraux described <i>Sanctuary</i> as "the eruptions of Greek tragedy into a detective story"; Larbaud called <i>As I Lay Dying</i> "Homeric." These
-->
...phrases from the prefaces were parroted in the reviews, and they became the basis for the French reception of contemporary American fiction. Discounting the plot and universalizing the themes threw the focus onto the technique, which is exactly where Coindreau wanted it to be thrown.
<p align=justify>
What did the French find so modern and exciting about American literary technique? ...
<!--
First, they thought that writers such as Faulkner and Dos Passos had solved a problem with the representation of time. Time is a traditional French preoccupation. Marcel Proust's novel is a monument to that fascination, which is also behind the celebrity of the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose distinction between clock time and experienced time, which he called <i>la durée</i>, was the basis of his first book, <i>Essai sur les donées immédiates de la conscience</i> (translated as <i>Time and Free Will</i>), in 1889.
-->
The French thought that Faulkner had achieved a powerful representation of lived time by radically subjectivizing the narration and by collapsing the distinction between percept and memory. ...
<!--
In the opening section of <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>, for example, Benjy's stream of consciousness alternates between present perceptions and remembered perceptions without obvious textual signaling (which is the reason many readers have trouble making sense of it).
-->
<p align=justify>
Faulkner and Dos Passos showed French novelists that you could organize a narrative nonlinearly and nonchronologically. ...
<!--
"Faulkner had contrived to give his narrative <i>durée</i> even though he annihilated normal-time sequence," as Beauvoir put it. Coindreau thought that for Faulkner, the concept of a past, present, and future is only
-->
<p align=justify>
[80]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
convenient illusion in our brains." Another French critic proposed that Faulkner had gone beyond Joyce and Virginia Woolf by abandoning the factitious coherence of the stream of consciousness—the <i>I</i>—and had reproduced "the incongruous multiplicity [la multiplicité hétéroclite] of the elementary sensations of selfhood."
-->
<p align=justify>
The other thing about American fiction that fascinated the French was what they took to be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the elimination of psychology
</mark>
. "Hemingway never enters inside his characters," Sartre wrote. "He describes them always from the outside. The heroes of Hemingway and Caldwell never explain themselves. They act only." Sartre thought that Faulkner was his kind of phenomenologist;
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
he showed the inside only to confirm that there is nothing there
</mark>
. Thought in Faulkner is simply the sum of one's intentions and character the sum of one's actions. The American novel seemed to have completely rejected what the modern French novel, and Proust's novel paradigmatically, had made its specialty: introspection
and analysis.
<p align=justify>
<!--
Alchough the French talked in a general way about l'école d'outre-atlantique and le style américain, different French novelists responded to different American writers. Jules Romains admired Dos Passos, whom he thought had discovered a narrative technique for representing collectivity, for making the spirit of the city the protagonist of a novel."° Beauvoir said that although she borrowed formal elements from Dos Passos for L'Invitée, the most obvious influence on her writing was Hemingway (some of whose stories she read in English)."' Camus (who did not know English) said that he wrote L'Etranger in an American style, which Sartre identified as Hemingway's."* Sartre published influential essays on Faulkner, but in the end found him too fatalistic. "I love his art," he wrote; "I do not believe in his metaphysics."IS But he called Dos Passos "the greatest writer of our time" and the crisscrossing narrative of his own trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) was modeled on U.S.A. (or at least the two volumes Sartre was able to read in French). 116
-->
<p align=justify>
A myth of primitivism figured in the French reception of American culture. ...
<!--
In his preface to <i>A Farewell to Arms</i>, Drieu wrote excitedly about the brutality and rawness of Hemingway's writing.
-->
When the Harvard professor Perry Miller toured European universities lecturing on American literature after the war, he reported enthusiasm wherever he went for American writing—provided it was violent. ...
<!--
"As long as a book faunted the stigmata of American violence, it was accepted
-->
<p align=justify>
[81]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
uncritically as the real thing," Miller reported. ". . . Almost anything which pretends to be 'tough' will be read." He found that he could not get Eurapeans excited about the Henry James revival.
-->
<p align=justify>
The French thought that American fiction was raw and direct because that was the way Americans are. In American novels, Camus said in 1947, "[m]an is described but never explained"; the stories are universal, but "only at the level of the elementary." Sartre thought that <i>le style américain</i> was uncalculated and unreflective, a spontaneous outburst, and that American writers expressed themselves that way because they couldn't help it. "When Hemingway writes his short, disjointed sentences, he is only obeying his temperament," Sartre explained. "He writes what he sees . . . If Faulkner breaks the chronological order of his story, it is because he cannot do otherwise, He sees time jumping about in disordered leaps." Of course, Faulkner didn't show time jumping about in disordered leaps because he couldn't help it. He showed time that way because he had read Bergson.
<p align=justify>
French critics had an explanation for the absence of explanation in American fiction: they thought that American writers were imitating the movies.
<!--
The argument was made in the most important critical study in France of American fiction (there were several), Claude-Edmonde Magny's <i>L'Age du roman américain</i> (The Age of the American Novel), published in 1948 but composed of articles originally published in 1944 and 1945. Magny argued that the techniques in American fiction were literary adaptations of cinema. She said a lot about montage and ellipsis, but
-->
...at the most basic level, the French thought that the influence of film could be seen in the paratactic atomization of action—the <i>and then</i>, <i>and then</i>, <i>and then</i> narration—of writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. What we are presented with is a sequence of actions
without commentary, like a scene in a film.
<p align=justify>
Sartre and Beauvoir's enthusiasm for American fiction went hand in hand with their enthusiasm for American popular culture generally and American movies in particular. ...
<!--
They read Dashiell Hammett; they were devoted to American folk music—spirituals, working songs, the blues. They loved Hollywood Westerns and gangster pictures. When they launched their own journal after the war as a replacement for the suspended NRF, they named it after a Charlie Chaplin movie, <i>Modern Times</i>. -->
They hated French films and French fiction. "[W]e loathed the whole idea of <i>la vie intérieure,</i>" said Beauvoir.
<p align=justify>
[82]
<p align=justify>
During his time in the army, Sartre recorded in his diary a fantasy of becoming a man of unreflective action. Such a man, he wrote, would be
</font>
<blockquote>
<font face=times size=1>
handsome, hesitant, obscure, slow and upright in his thoughts; [he would] not have had any acquired grace, but only a silent, spontaneous kind:
<br>
...
<!--
I saw him, for some reason, as a worker and hobo in the Eastern USA. How I should like to feel uncertain ideas slowly, patiently forming within me! How I should have liked to boil with great, obscure rages; faint from great, motiveless outpourings of tenderness! My American worker (who resembled Gary Cooper) could do and feel all that. I pictured him sitting on a railway embankment, tired and dusty; he'd be waiting for the cattle-truck [le wagon à bestiaux], into which he'd jump unseen—and
-->
<br>
I should have liked to be him. . . [a man] who thought little, spoke little and always did the right thing.
</font>
</blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<font face=times>
Sartre
<!--
seems to have confused the eastern and western parts of the United States, and it is entertaining to imagine him as Gary Cooper jumping into a cattle truck whatever that is. He
-->
...was plainly taking his idea of America and the American from the movies. But it made sense for him to do this, because he was trying to analyze his way out of a culture of analysis. In a sense, he was trying to do philosophy in <i>le style américain</i>.
<br><br>
</font>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<br>
<p>
François Cusset
<br>
trans. Jeff Fort
<br>
<i>
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States
</i>
<br>
(2008, orig. 2003)
<br>
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<font face=times>
<p align=justify>
[276] In summary, French theory did not acquire its crucial dimension of
<i>difference</i> only through its aesthetic and political radicalism, but also through its ineluctable Frenchness—which, however clichéd this may be, is defined in the American mind-set by the values of seduction and irony. For theory too involves a certain seduction through irony. In the phrase "It's so French," repeated so often by American Francophiles—a zero degree of culturalist expression, but which is used only in reference to the French...
<!--
(*it's so German" or "it's so Italian" come up far less often)~
-->
—the quantitative adverb "so" points to an excess viewed as a flaw, an insidious form of immoderation, as if Frenchness signified a certain polite form of arrogance, a way of employing courteous verbiage or a sophisticated writing style to draw its interlocutor into doubtful paths and false conclusions, bringing us back to the primary sense of <i>seducere</i> in Latin. We might consider that an unstable balance has been struck, one that appears miraculous in American eyes, between formal classicism (as in Foucault's case) and extreme arguments, or between the accessibility and openness of a philosopher in person (for which Derrida was often praised) and the difficulty of the author and his works; it is this sense of balance that gave rise to the notion of a <i>French seduction</i> to which these authors owe much of their success in the United States. ...
<!--
Feminist Jane Gallop, duly mistrustful of all forms of seduction, nonetheless recognizes "this particular intersection of Seduction and Theory": "A good number of us have, in recent years, been swept away by something both
-->
<p align=justify>
[277]
<p align=justify>
<!--
charming and dangerous which, for lack of an honest name, I will call French Theory." Even the strong French accents of Derrida or Baudrillard, when speaking to their audience in English, play a role in this seduction, because, as Erving Goffman remarks, in a public conference, "what is noise from the point of view of the text" can become "music from the point of view of interaction." In this way,
-->
...certain cultural archetypes based on typical French <i>seduction</i> or <i>chatter</i> preceded, permeated, and even helped construct, to a large extent, the idea of theory. This is also why, for the past thirty years, American universities, after their extensive use of this small group of theoretical authors, scarcely more than a dozen, have taken an interest in everything they could find that appeared related to French theory and its charms of irony, considering New Wave cinema or the Nouveau Roman as accessories to theory,...
<!--
with Robbe-Grillet often being studied as an illustration of Derrida's thought, or Georges Perec as an extension of Deleuze's work—all pointing to an avant-garde French culture to be reevaluated in light of this same culture's "theory." The latter continues to be seen as polyphonic, coolly critical, obscure, seductive, and crafty: thus defined, French theory has clearly become a cultural norm.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br><br>
...
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
[279]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
it useful, and it was this process that was perfected, through many trials and guesses, in versions of Derrida, Deleuze, or Lyotard entirely <i>unknown</i> in France.
-->
<p align=justify>
Foucault's work is an example that stands apart. Even in comparison with Derrida, who became an icon and an institution during his lifetime, Foucault's long-term impact in the United States remains unequaled, both in terms of his books sold in translation...
<!--
(more than three hundred thousand copies of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, more than two hundred thousand copies of Madness and Civilization, and more than 150,000 copies of The Order of Things)
-->
and in the range of fields of study he has transformed or brought into existence, as well as in the diversity of his audience:...
<!--
the works in his immense bibliography of readers and collections include one on Foucault for social workers, one in comic-book form for beginners, and even one to remind us that Nelson Mandela's South Africa is not free from apartheid.
-->
John Rajchman's book,...
<!--
which calls Foucault the modern <i>skeptic</i> and praises his "ethics of freedom,"
-->
and the Dreyfus and Rabinow classic study offer interpretations of Foucault of a quality that few similar projects in France have matched. There is, nevertheless, a considerable gap between the American Foucault and the French one,...
<!--
which Vincent Descombes views as "incompatible" with each other in an influential article in which he contrasts the French anarchistic agitator Foucault, reading Surrealist theory, with an American Foucault focused on practices and political morals, who attempts to "redefine <i>autonomy</i> in purely human terms."
-->
The difference is primarily one of status: in the United States, Foucault represents the <i>intellectual-oracle</i>, whose prose unmasks
biopower, furnishes weapons to contemporary struggles, and heralds the queer movement, and who is also the figure whose invigorating "philosophical laughter" provides assurance of the critical distance from his own discourses. In the American reading of Foucault, we find that the explosive pairing of "knowledge and power" occupies a much more central position than in Foucault's own perspective, and is seen as the key to his entire work, as well as the basis for an entire intellectual outlook. In the United States,
<br>
the rallying cry that was developed out of this binomial,
<br>
power-knowledge,
<br>
has served many purposes:
<br><br>
an impetus
<br>
for
<br>
a push to require
<br>
the ivory tower of academia
<br>
to carry out
<br>
its own performative duties,
<br><br>
a theoretical proof
<br>
that
<br>
universalism and rationalism
<br>
can be used
<br>
as
<br>
discourses of conquest,
<br><br>
and
<br>
a support
<br>
for
<br>
the notion
<br>
that
<br>
it is
<p align=justify>
[280]
<p align=justify>
exclusion
<br>
(of the insane, of criminals)
<br>
that
<br>
produces the norm
<br>
(reason, justice)
<br>
.
<br><br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
This interpretation of Foucault
</mark>
, taking the aforementioned three main directions,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
provided his American readers with a veritable
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
<i>conspiracy theory</i>,
</mark>
in the name of which they scoured society to uncover its aggressors and victims. American cultural studies or minority studies texts inspired by Foucault consistently focus on the notion of "unmasking" of "delegitimizing" some form of power that is "stifling" or "marginalizing" one oppressed minority group or another—
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an approach that stands
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
in direct opposition
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
to Foucault's genealogical method.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<!--
Foucault's aim, after all, was to create an <i>analytics</i> of power, not an axiology of it;
-->
...as for turning him into the most fervent advocate for those without a voice, this role is conceivable only if we neglect the two limits of Foucault's "politics":
<br><br>
first,
<br>
the difficulty
<br>
of
<br>
establishing a coherent notion
<br>
of
<br>
the <i>subject</i>,
<br>
of history,
<br>
or of political struggle,
<br>
because
<br>
power itself
<br>
"is exercised from innumerable points"
<br>
and
<br>
"resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power,"
<br><br>
and,
<br>
second,
<br>
the opposite criticism
<br>
of which Foucault is often the target,
<br>
according to which
<br>
he
<br>
steals the voice of those without a voice,
<br>
speaking on behalf
<br>
of
<br>
the silent residents of asylums or prisons
<br>
just for the sake of
<br>
the sparks this produces
<br>
on a written page.
<br><br>
We might remember that Foucault asked to be spared this "morality of bureaucrats and police" that requires philosophers "to remain the same." This gap continued to grow with the thematic focuses of the following years, centered on the "ethics of the self" and the "truth-telling" elements of his work. Foucault's renown, which began growing in 1977, reached such a peak that his successors wanted to derive a "method" of self-construction from his work, a task for which they solicited Foucault's assistance during a series of lectures he gave at New York University (to which he is said to have responded, "The last thing I want to tell you is how to live!"). Their objective was to glean the essential principles of <i>savoir-vivre</i>, whether of a gay, stoic, philosophical, or activist variety. In an interview with the periodical <i>Salmagundi</i>, Foucault was even compelled to repeat insistently, "I am wary of imposing my own views," and then "I want to avoid imposing my own scheme," and finally, "as for prescribing [a] direction . . . I prefer not to legislate such matters." Certain critics even heard in Foucault the distant strains of a patriotic interpretation: Foucault's lexicon was made to resonate with an "American Aesthetics of Liberty," the idea being that Foucault and the United States share "a tradition of ethics
<p align=justify>
[281]
<p align=justify>
that presents self-stylization as a practice of freedom," in which the self is "assumed to be a work of art" and "the desirability of normalization itself" is ceaselessly questioned—<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">a mostly
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
literary
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
take on the subject
</mark>
amounting overall to a para-Foucauldian ode to pioneering, repressive America and its unexamined myths, one that Foucault the activist would no doubt have found distasteful.
<!--
<p align=justify>
We have already mentioned, on the subject of deconstruction. Derrida's pragmatic paradox: to <i>construct</i> a deconstructive approach to any
text, as a communicable method of reading, and a body of murdelines,
which creates a contradiction, riot so much between method and an un-
mediated surge as between the text's <i>autonomy</i> and the reader's <i>will</i>. We can never choose to deconstruct the essence or the origin, as Derrida, in his characteristic way, emphasizes: *In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a choice." This double prohibition brings us back to the problem of taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work. The aims of deconstruction are also required, as its condition of possibility. As Paul de Man suggests, deconstructing the "illusion of reference," the possibility that a text can relate us to nontextual reality, can only be accomplished in a referential mode, even if once removed; as Derrida reminds us, if metaphysics makes critical thought possible, a critique of metaphysics will necessarily be its accomplice. Thus, the project of deconstruction is constantly slipping away, extending the hope of an escape from metaphysics like a light glimmering on the horizon for its American readers, keen to break from the hold of nostalgia, when in fact these categories of interior and exterior are themselves metaphysical concepts. The evolution of Derrida's works, beginning with a more or less systematic theorization of deconstruction and proceeding toward its textual and intertextual application, employing an experimental style of language and elliptical arguments, only added to this gap by making Derrida's later work much less <i>literally</i> usable in the United States—especially because Derrida himself often added fuel to the fire, ridiculing the "didactic" approach of a certain type of deconstruction, repackaged as "practical, in the sense of easy, convenient, and even salable as a commodity," when this theory is really "indissociable from a process and a law of expropriation . . . that resists in the last instance, in order to challenge it, every subjective movement of appropriation of the following sort: I deconstruct . . ." Because this contradiction brings to light the workings of metaphysical philosophy,
-->
</font>
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***introspection***
</h5>
Louis Menand
<i>The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War</i>
(2021)
[80]
<i>"The other thing about American fiction that fascinated the French was what they took to be the elimination of psychology. "Hemingway never enters inside his characters," Sartre wrote. "He describes them always from the outside. The heroes of Hemingway and Caldwell never explain themselves. They act only." ... The American novel seemed to have completely rejected what the modern French novel, and Proust's novel paradigmatically, had made its specialty: introspection and analysis."</i>
[81]
<i>"The French thought that American fiction was raw and direct because that was the way Americans are. In American novels, Camus said in 1947, "[m]an is described but never explained";... Sartre thought that <i>le style américain</i> was uncalculated and unreflective, a spontaneous outburst, and that American writers expressed themselves that way because they couldn't help it. ...
"...at the most basic level, the French thought that the influence of film could be seen in the paratactic atomization of action—the </i>and then, and then, and then<i> narration—of writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. What we are presented with is a sequence of actions without commentary, like a scene in a film.
"Sartre and Beauvoir's enthusiasm for American fiction went hand in hand with their enthusiasm for American popular culture generally and American movies in particular. ... They hated French films and French fiction. "[W]e loathed the whole idea of </i>la vie intérieure,<i>" said Beauvoir."</i>
François Cusset
trans. Jeff Fort
<i>French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States</i>
(2008, orig. 2003)
[280]
<i>"Certain critics even heard in Foucault the distant strains of a patriotic interpretation: Foucault's lexicon was made to resonate with an "American Aesthetics of Liberty," the idea being that Foucault and the United States share "a tradition of ethics</i>
[281]
<i>that presents self-stylization as a practice of freedom," in which the self is "assumed to be a work of art" and "the desirability of normatization itself" is ceaselessly questioned—a mostly literary take on the subject amounting overall to a para-Foucauldian ode to pioneering, repressive America and its unexamined myths, one that Foucault the activist would no doubt have found distasteful."</i>
(<a href=" ">more</a>)
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***hearing mod***
</h5>
François Cusset
trans. Jeff Fort
<i>French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States</i>
(2008, orig. 2003)
[277]
<i>"...certain cultural archetypes based on typical French </i>seduction<i> or </i>chatter<i> preceded, permeated, and even helped construct, to a large extent, the idea of theory. This is also why, for the past thirty years, American universities, after their extensive use of this small group of theoretical authors, scarcely more than a dozen, have taken an interest in everything they could find that appeared related to French theory and its charms of irony, considering New Wave cinema or the Nouveau Roman as accessories to theory,..."</i>
[280]
<i>"This interpretation of Foucault,...provided his American readers with a veritable </i>conspiracy theory<i>, in the name of which they scoured society to uncover its aggressors and victims. American cultural studies or minority studies texts inspired by Foucault consistently focus on the notion of "unmasking" of "delegitimizing" some form of power that is "stifling" or "marginalizing" one oppressed minority group or another—an approach that stands in direct opposition to Foucault's genealogical method."</i>
(<a href=" ">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-27090769482115315602023-08-25T15:09:00.000-07:002023-08-25T15:09:51.455-07:00Framed<br>
<p>
from "<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/frame-problem/
">The Frame Problem</a>," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
</p>
<blockquote align=justify>
To many philosophers, the AI researchers' frame problem is suggestive of a wider epistemological issue, namely whether it is possible, in principle, to limit the scope of the reasoning required to derive the consequences of an action.
<br>
...
<br>
Using mathematical logic, how is it possible to write formulae that describe the effects of actions without having to write a large number of accompanying formulae that describe the mundane, obvious non-effects of those actions?
<br>
...
<br>
What we need, it seems, is some way of declaring the general rule-of-thumb that an action can be assumed not to change a given property of a situation unless there is evidence to the contrary. This default assumption is known as the common sense law of inertia. The (technical) frame problem can be viewed as the task of formalising this law.
<br>
...
<br>
The puzzle, according to Dennett, is how “a cognitive creature … with many beliefs about the world” can update those beliefs when it performs an act so that they remain “roughly faithful to the world”?
<br>
...
<br>
the question of how to compute the consequences of an action without the computation having to range over the action's non-effects.
<!--
The solution to the computational aspect of the frame problem adopted in most symbolic AI programs is some variant of what McDermott calls
-->
...the “sleeping dog” strategy...
<!--
(McDermott 1987). The idea here is that
-->
not every part of the data structure representing an ongoing situation needs to be examined when it is updated to reflect a change in the world. ...
<!--
Rather, those parts that represent facets of the world that have change are modified, and the rest is simply left as it is (following the dictum “let sleeping dogs lie”).
-->
<br><br>
<!--
However, computational complexity is not the root of the genuine philosophical puzzle. For
-->
...the epistemological question is not so much how the computational challenge can be met, but rather how the robot could ever be sure it had sufficiently thought through the consequences of its actions to know that it hadn't missed anything important.
<!--
Only then is it in a position to safely apply the “common sense law of inertia” andassume the rest of the world is untouched. This epistemological problem coincides with the computational problem in the restrictive context of a representational formalism that is computationally decidable, such as propositional logic. But if we need the representational power of first-order predicate logic to build our robot — a fairly conservative assumption — then the epistemological issue remains separate.
-->
<br><br>
Fodor suggestively likens this to “Hamlet's problem: when to stop thinking” (Fodor 1987, p.140). The frame problem, he claims, is “Hamlet's problem viewed from an engineer's perspective”. But to warrant the award of depth, an epistemological problem must at least resist the most obvious attempts to resolve it. In the case of Hamlet's problem, the obvious appeal is to the notion of <i>relevance</i>. Only certain properties of a situation are relevant in the context of any given action, and consideration of the action's consequences can be conveniently confined to those.
<br><br>
...
<!--
At this point, we have pushed the frame problem into familiar territory for Fodor. For the difficulty now is one of determining what is and isn't relevant. -->
Fodor's claim is that when it comes to circumscribing the consequences of an action, just as in the business of theory confirmation in science, anything could be relevant (Fodor 1983, p.105). There are no <i>a priori</i> limits to the properties of the ongoing situation that might come into play. Accordingly, in his modularity thesis, Fodor uses the frame problem to bolster the view that the mind's central processes — those that are involved in fixing belief — are “informationally unencapsulated”, meaning that they can draw on information from any source (Fodor 1983; Fodor 2000).
<br>
...
<br>
solutions to the logical frame problem developed by AI researchers typically appeal to some version of the common sense law of inertia, according to which properties of a situation are assumed by default not to change as the result of an action.
<br>
...
<br>
According to Fodor, this metaphysical justification is unwarranted. To begin with, some actions change many, many things. ... But a deeper difficulty presents itself when we ask what is meant by “most properties”. What predicates should be included in our ontology for any of these claims about “most properties” to fall out?
<br>
...
<br>
These questions and the argument leading to them are very reminiscent of Goodman's treatment of induction... Goodman showed that inductive inference only works in the context of the right set of predicates, and Fodor demonstrates much the same point for the common sense law of inertia.
<br>
...
<br>
An intimate relationship of a different kind between the frame problem and the problem of induction is proposed by Fetzer (1991), who writes that “The problem of induction [is] one of justifying some inferences about the future as opposed to others. The frame problem, likewise, is one of justifying some inferences about the future as opposed to others. The second problem is an instance of the first.” This view of the frame problem is highly controversial, however (Hayes 1991).
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
From Susan Sontag, "Godard," in <i>Styles of Radical Will</i>:
<blockquote align=justify>
[164]
<br>
The most obvious way Godard segments the forward-moving sequence of narration into tableaux is by explicitly theatricalizing some of his material, once more laying to rest the lively prejudice that there is an essential incompatibility between the means of theatre and those of film. The conventions of the Hollywood musical, with songs and stage performances interrupting the story, supply one precedent for Godard—inspiring the general conception of <i>A Woman Is a Woman</i>, the dance trio in the café in <i>Band of Outsiders</i>, the song sequences and Vietnam protest skit performed outdoors in <i>Pierrot le Fou</i>, the singing telephone call in <i>Weekend</i>. His other model is, of course, the non-realistic and didactic theatre expounded by Brecht. An aspect of Godard Brechtianizing is his distinctive style of constructing political micro-entertainments: in <i>La Chinoise</i>, the home political theatre-piece acting out the American aggression in Vietnam; or the Feiffer dialogue of the two
ham radio operators that opens <i>Deux ou Trois Choses</i>.
<!--
But the more profound influence of Brecht resides in those formal devices Godard uses to counteract ordinary plot development and complicate the emotional involvement of the audience. One device is the direct-to-camera declarations by the characters in many films, notably <i>Deux ou Trois Choses</i>, <i>Made in U.S.A.</i>, and <i>La Chinoise</i>. ("One should speak as if one were quoting the truth," says Marina Vlady at the beginning of <i>Deux ou Trois Choses</i>, quoting Brecht. "The actors must quote.") Another frequently used technique derived from Brecht is the dissection of the film narrative into short sequences: in <i>My Life to Live</i>, in addition, Godard puts on the screen prefatory synopses to each scene which describe the action to follow. The action of <i>Les Carabiniers</i> is broken into short brutal sections introduced by long titles, most of which represent cards sent home by Ulysses and Michelangelo; the titles are handwritten, which makes them a little harder to read and brings home to the movie audience the fact that it is being asked to read. Another, simpler device is the relatively arbitrary subdivision of action into numbered sequences, as
-->
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<hr>
<p>
A
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
lively prejudice
</mark>
? Or a mere statement of the obvious? Who's to say?
<p>
At the risk of obscuring rather than clarifying the situation, I would suggest that us arty types pay closer (any) attention to our ontological
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
predicates
</mark>
; at which point there is little left to say about the import and export of
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
means
</mark>
between art forms but <i>quite a lot</i> yet to be said about ends.
<p>
In other words:
<br>
<b>if it works, it works</b>;
<br>
but
<br>
<b>it cannot possibly work the same way in cinema
<br>
as it does in theater</b>
<br>
because
<br>
<b>there remain</b>
<br>
(despite spirited efforts to the contrary)
<br>
<b>irreducible material differences</b>
<br>
("ontological predicates," if you insist)
<br>
<b>between the two mediums</b>
<br>
.
<p>
In other words,
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
some actions change many, many things
</mark>
.
<p>
In other words,
<br>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
means
</mark>
be damned;
<br>
the ends can have no
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
precedent
</mark>
.
</p>
<br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-1665021267483072662023-07-12T18:58:00.001-07:002023-07-12T18:58:04.715-07:00Caillois—MPG (vii)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[129]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER IX
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
Revivals in the Modern World
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
Since <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i> are always tempting to man, it is not easy to eliminate them from social life at the point where they have become merely children's amusements or aberrant behavior. ...
<!--
As careful as one may be in discrediting their power, discouraging their use, and controlling or neutralizing their effects, mask and possession still remain quite menacing.
-->
It may therefore be necessary to concede them some outlet,...
<!--
no doubt limited and harmless but noisy and at least bordering upon their vaguely mysterious and thrilling pleasures, upon panic, stupor, and frenzy.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
In this way, savage explosive powers are unleashed that may suddenly become
a dangerous paroxysm. In addition,
-->
...their major force derives from their being paired. In order to subdue them more easily there is nothing better than to divide their strength and ban their combining. ...
<!--
Simulation and vertigo, mask and ecstasy, have always been allied in the unique and hallucinated universe that survives because of their collusion.
-->
Henceforth they can no longer be present, except in disjointed, at-
<p align=justify>
[130]
<p align=justify>
tenuated, and isolated form, in a world that denies them and which prospers only to the degree that it succeeds in containing or duping their irresponsible violence.
<p align=justify>
In effect, the mask necessarily loses its power of metamorphosis in a society freed from bondage to the <i>mimicry-ilinx</i> combination. The wearer of the mask no longer feels that he is the reincarnation of the monstrous powers whose inhuman visage he has donned. Those whom he frightens can no longer be harmed by the strange apparition. The mask itself has changed its appearance and also, in large measure, its purpose. In fact,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it has acquired a new, strictly utilitarian role.
</mark>
As a means of disguise for the malefactor seeking to hide his identity, it does
not intrude a new presence but
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
protects him from being recognized
</mark>
. ...
<!--
Besides, what good is a mask? A handkerchief would do. A mask is rather a mechanism for protecting the respiratory organs in a contaminated environment or assuring a supply of needed oxygen to the lungs. In both cases, the traditional function of the mask is remote.
-->
<p>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
The Mask and the Uniform
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
As George Buraud has aptly observed, modern society is scarcely aware of the two survivals of the sorcerer's mask: the black mask and the grotesque carnival mask.
-->
The black mask, the mask reduced to its essentials, elegant and abstract, has long been associated with erotic fetes and with conspiracies. ...
<!--
It characterizes equivocally sensual intrigues and mysterious plots against the powers that be.
-->
It is the symbol of amorous or political intrigue. ...
<!--
It is disturbing and somewhat of a thrill. At the same time, it assures anonymity, protects, and liberates. At a ball, it is not merely two strangers who hold and dance with each other; they are two beings who symbolize mystery and who are already bound by a tacit promise of secrecy. The mask ostensibly liberates them from social constraints.
-->
In a world in which sexual relationships are subject to many taboos, it is
<p align=justify>
[131]
<p align=justify>
noteworthy that the black mask, named after a wild and predatory beast, traditionally symbolizes the means and often the announced decision to violate these taboos.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The entire intrigue is conducted like a game, i.e. conforming to pre-established conventions, in an atmosphere and within limits that separate it from and do not entail any consequences for ordinary life.
-->
<p align=justify>
In origin, the carnival is an explosion of license that, even more than the costume ball, requires disguise and is founded upon the liberty that it facilitates. ...
<!--
Enormous, comic, and exaggerately painted cardboard masks are the equivalent on the popular level of the black mask of high society. This time, it is no longer a question of gallant adventures, of complicated intrigues along with clever repartee in which the partners attack and retreat, each in turn.
-->
Carnival masks involve instead indecencies, jostling, provocative laughter,...
<!--
exposed breasts, mimicking buffoonery, a permanent incitement to riot, feasting, and excessive talk, noise, and movement. Masks are a brief compensation for the decency and prudence that must be observed the rest of the year. The masked ones approach and act as if they are terrifying.
-->
The passer-by, playing the game, makes believe that he is afraid, or conversely, that he is not afraid. If he becomes angry, he is disqualified. In refusing to play, he fails to understand that the social conventions have been momentarily replaced by others intended to flout them. ...
<!--
In a delimited time and space, the carnival results in disorder, violence, cynicism, and unbridled instinct. However, it leads at the same time to disinterested, idle, and joyous activity, to a <i>jeu bouffon</i>, to use G. Buraud's exact expression, and further, is not thought of as a game. But no one is deceived. This ultimate decadence of sacred <i>mimicry</i> is nothing but a game, and possesses most of the characteristics of a game. Basically, it is nearer to <i>paidia</i> than to <i>ludus</i>, wholly related to anarchic improvisation, Dionysianism, and gesticulation, a pure release of energy.
-->
<p align=justify>
Even this is too much. Order and moderation are soon imposed upon this effervescence, and it all ends in parades, blos-
<p align=justify>
[132]
<p align=justify>
som festivals, and costume competitions. On the other hand, the authorities are so well aware that masks are a vital source of release that they were content merely to ban them alone as in Rio de Janeiro, when the general frenzy threatened for a dozen consecutive years, to reach proportions incompatible with the simple functioning of public services.
<p align=justify>
In a
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
police state
</mark>
, the
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
uniform
</mark>
replaces the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mask
</mark>
of a vertiginous society. The uniform is almost the exact opposite of the mask, and always symbolizes
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
a type of authority founded on entirely opposing principles
</mark>
. The mask aimed to dissimulate and terrify. ...
<!--
It signified the eruption of a fearful, capricious, intermittent, and inordinate power, which emerged to evoke pious terror in the profane masses and to punish them for their imprudence and their faults.
-->
The uniform is also a disguise, but it is official, permanent, regulated, and, above all, leaves the face exposed. It makes the individual a representative and a servant of an impartial and immutable rule, rather than the delirious prey of contagious vehemence. ...
<!--
Behind the mask, the face of the possessed, when repelled, can assume a haggard or tortured expression with impunity, while the official must be careful that his bare face reveal nothing but calm and rationality, the face of a person specially charged with administering the law.
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Perhaps there is no better or more striking indication of the contrast between these two types of society than in these two distinctive appearances
</mark>
—one that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
disguises
</mark>
and the other that
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
proclaims
</mark>
—and between those upon whom devolves the responsibility for preserving such contrasting types of social order.
<br><br><br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
The Traveling Fair
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
Apart from modest resort to rattles and drums, roundelays and farandoles, the carnival is strangely lacking in instruments and occasions of vertigo. ...
<!--
It seems disarmed, reduced to the minimal yet considerable resources derived from wearing masks.
-->
The proper domain of vertigo is elsewhere, as if a special wis-
<p align=justify>
[133]
<p align=justify>
dom had prudently dissociated the powers of <i>ilinx</i> and <i>mimicry</i>. Fairgrounds and amusement parks, where by contrast the wearing of masks is not customary, in compensation constitute special places in which are found the seeds, snares, and lures of vertigo. These surroundings exhibit the basic characteristics of playing fields. ...
<!--
They are separated in space by porticoes, hedges, ramps, luminous signs, posts, flags, and all kinds of decorations that are visible from a distance and which demarcate the boundaries of a consecrated universe. In fact, once the frontier is crossed, one finds himself in a world that is peculiarly more crowded than that of ordinary life. It is a world of excited and noisy throngs, a debauch of color and light, of ceaseless and exhausting motion to the point of satiety, in which one may easily accost others or try to attract attention to oneself and which is conducive to freedom, familiarity, boastfulness, and debonair impudence. All this adds a peculiar atmosphere to the general animation.
-->
Where traveling fairs are involved, their seasonal character also adds a time dimension to the spatial separation, thus opposing a time of paroxysm to the monotonous routine of daily life.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
As has been observed, the fair and the amusement park seem to be the proper domain of vertigo-inducing contraptions—machines for rotation, oscillation, suspension, and falling, constructed for the purpose of provoking visceral panic. However, all the categories of play are concurrently and seductively involved. Shooting guns or arrows are competitive games of skill in the most classic form. The booths of wrestlers are an invitation to everyone to measure his strength against that of the bemedaled, corpulent, breast-plated champions. Further on one encounters an incline that precariously balances at one end a
chariot laden with numerous, heavy weights.
-->
<p align=justify>
Lotteries are everywhere. ...
<!--
Wheels spin, deciding the winner at the point where they stop. The tension of <i>agôn</i> alternates with the anxious anticipation of fortune's favor.
-->
Fakirs, fortune-tellers, and astrologers predict the future or read the stars. ...
<!--
They employ secret techniques newly discovered by science, "nuclear
-->
<p align=justify>
[134]
<p align=justify>
<!--
radioactivity," or "existential psychoanalysis." Thus is satisfied the taste for <i>alea</i> and for superstition that damns one's soul.
-->
<i>Mimicry</i> is also present. Jesters, clowns, ballerinas, and mummers parade and cavort in order to lure the public. They are examples of the attraction of simulation and the power of travesty, which they monopolize, since the crowd on this occasion is not permitted to wear disguises.
<p align=justify>
However, the dominant atmosphere is that of vertigo. ...
<!--
To begin with, there are the huge, impressive, and complicated engines that cause intoxication at three- to six-minute intervals. Little cars travel on arc-shaped, almost perfectly circular tracks, so that the vehicle, before straightening out, seems to fall freely and the passengers strapped to the seat have the impression that they are falling with it. In addition, the patrons are enclosed in swinging cages which turn them upside down high above the crowd. In a third contraption, the sudden release of gigantic springs catapults cars to the end of a track; they are slowly returned to their starting place to be projected outward again. All is calculated to stimulate thrills, fright, and panic through speed, falling, shaking, and accelerated gyrations combined with alternating ascents and descents. And lastly, there is an invention which utilizes centrifugal force. While the floor slopes downward and sinks several yards, the stunned patrons, with nothing to lean on, their bodies sprawled in all kinds of postures, are glued to a giant cylinder. They lie there "like flies on flypaper," to quote from the establishments' publicity.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
These
-->
...physical sensations are reinforced by many related forms of fascination...
<!--
designed to disorient, mislead, and stimulate confusion, anxiety, nausea, and momentary terror, quickly transformed into laughter upon getting off the contraption, a sudden transition from physical disorder to ineffable relief. -->
This is the function of labyrinths of mirrors and of freak shows exhibiting
giants, dwarfs, mermaids,...
<!--
creatures that are half-child and half-monkey or half-woman and half-octopus, men whose skins have dark spots like those of leopards. The horror is compounded by being invited to touch them. Facing these attractions
-->
<p align=justify>
[135]
<p align=justify>
<!--
are the no less ambiguous seductions of phantom trains and gloomy, haunted houses filled with apparitions, skeletons, entangling spider webs, bats' wings, trap doors, drafts, unearthly cries, and many other equally puerile effects, a naive arsenal or miscellany of terror, adequate to exacerbate nervousness grown complacent and generate a fleeting horror.
-->
<p align=justify>
Games involving glass, special effects, and ghosts all lead to the same result—the creation of a fictional world in desired contrast with the ordinary life that is dominated by the conventonal species and from which demons have been banished. ...
<!--
The disconcerting reflections that multiply and distort the shape of
one's body, the hybrid fauna, legendary monsters, nightmarish defectives, the grafts of an accursed surgery, the sickly horror of embryonic gropings, larvae, vampires, automatons, and Martians (for everything that is strange or disturbing is of use here),
-->
...<i>[to]</i> supplement on another level the wholly physical thrill by which the vertiginous machines momentarily distort one's sensory stability.
<p align=justify>
<br>
Is a reminder necessary that all of this is still play, i.e. free, isolated, limited, and regulated?
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I do think so. Categorizing all of this as a form of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Play and Games
</mark>
is actually mildly provocative. It also/instead belongs in the category of performance art...right where Rank-Becker would place it. The fact of seeing-and-being-seen cannot be merely incidental. Nor can the arrogation of a certain self-concept. Devolving always to an analysis of "culture" and "civilization" papers over the consideration of individual motivations, which may have little to do with reductionist accounts of a culture. But admittedly that IS quite beyond the scope of the present book.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
First comes vertigo, and then intoxication, terror, and mystery.
-->
Sometimes the sensations are frightfully brutal, but the duration and intensity of the shock are controlled in advance. ...
<!--
For the rest, everyone knows that the phantasmagoria is make-believe and intended to entertain rather than really injure.
-->
Everything is regulated in great detail and conforms to one of the more conservative traditions. ...
<!--
Even the delicacies on display in the confectioners' stalls have something changeless about their nature and appeal, viz. nougats, jelly apples, or gingerbread cake on a glazed paper plate decorated with medallions and long, bright fringes, or gingerbread pigs with the first name of the buyer imprinted on them.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is pleasure founded upon excitement, illusion, and disorder that has been agreed to, falling and being caught, blunted shocks and harmless collisions. ...
<!--
A perfect example of such recreation is furnished by the colliding autos in which, to the pleasure of being at the wheel (the serious, almost solemn faces of some
-->
<p align=justify>
[136]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
drivers should be observed), is added the elemental joy reminiscent of <i>paidia</i>, quarreling, pursuing other vehicles, outflanking them, barring their passage, endlessly causing pseudo-accidents with no damage or victims, doing exactly and until sated what in real life is most strictly forbidden.
-->
<p align=justify>
For those old enough, on the mock auto raceway just as elsewhere at the fair,...
<!--
in every panic-inducing machine, on every frightening ride,
-->
the effects of dizziness and terror are joined to produce an added diffuse and insidious anguish and delight, that of seeking a sexual liaison. At this point one leaves the realm of play as such. ...
<!--
At least in this respect, the fair approximates the masqued ball and the carnival, presenting the same propitious atmosphere for the desired adventure, with one significant exception. Vertigo has replaced the mask.
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
We might just as well conclude, then, that there is <i>no such thing</i> as play.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
The Circus
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
The circus is a natural part of the traveling fair. This is a segregated society with its own costumes, pride, and laws. It comprises a population jealous of its special character, proud of its isolation, and endogamous. Its professional secrets are transmitted from father to son. As far as possible, it settles its own differences without resorting to the courts.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Lion tamers, jugglers, equestriennes, clowns, and acrobats are subjected to a rigorous discipline from infancy. All dream of perfecting their numbers to the least detail in order to assure success and—in an emergency—safety.
-->
<p align=justify>
This closed and rigorous universe constitutes the austere side of the fair. The decisive sanction of death is necessarily present,...
<!--
for the lion tamer just as for the acrobat.
-->
It forms part of the tacit agreement that binds the performers and the spectators. It enters into the rules of a game that anticipates a total risk. ...
<!--
The unanimity of circus people in refusing the net or cable that would
protect them from a tragic fall speaks for itself. It is necessary
-->
<p align=justify>
[137]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
for the state to impose such safety devices against their stubborn resistance, but this falsifies the totality of the wager.
-->
<p align=justify>
For circus people the big top represents not merely a profession but a way of life, not really comparable to sports, casino, or stage for champions, gamblers, or professional actors. In the circus there is added a kind of hereditary fatalism and a much sharper break with ordinary life. Because of this, circus life, strictly speaking, cannot be regarded as synonymous with play. And yet, two of its traditional activities are literally and significantly associated with <i>ilinx</i> and <i>mimicry</i>. I allude to the tightrope and the universality of certain kinds of clowning.
<p align=justify>
... It is surely a special road which puts man on the brink of so fearful a spell. It has been seen how the Lacedaemonian sorcerer became a legislator and pedagogue, the masked band of wolf-men evolved into a political police, and frenzy ultimately became institutionalized. Here we have another provocative development, more fecund, more propitious for the development of grace, liberty, and invention, always oriented toward equilibrium, detachment, and irony and not toward the pursuit of an implacable and perhaps, in its turns, a vertiginous domination. Evolution does not rule out the emergence of the first fissure, destined after a thousand vicissitudes to destroy the all-powerful coalition of simulation and vertigo, through a strange, almost imperceptible innovation, apparently absurd and doubtless sacrilegious. This is the introduction into the band of masked divinities of characters of equal rank and identical authority, charged with parodying their bewitching mimes, and tempering by laughter what might end fatally in trance and hypnosis, were this antidote absent.
</p>
<br><br><br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[143]
<br><br><br><br><br>
<center>
<font size=5>
<i>
Addenda
</i>
</font>
</center>
<br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[145]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
APPENDIX I
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
The Importance of Games of
<br>
Chance
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
Even in an industrial civilization, founded on the value of work, the taste for games of chance remains extremely powerful, the exact opposite of what is involved in earning money,...
<!--
described in Théodule Ribot's formula as "the fascination of acquiring a lot of money all at once, and without effort." From this is derived the abiding attraction of lotteries, gambling houses, and the pari-mutuels at horse races and football games. For the assured but ill-esteemed rewards of patience and effort there is substituted the seductive mirage of sudden wealth, leisure, and luxury. For the masses who work hard and earn little, the prospect of getting rich quickly seems the only way to ever emerge from lowly or wretched status. -->
Play mocks at work and represents a competing attraction which, at least in some cases, assumes sufficient importance to partly determine the life-style of an entire society.
<p align=justify>
[146]
<p align=justify>
The cultural creativity of these considerations is not proved, even though they sometimes contribute a socioeconomic function to games of chance. Instead they are suspected of encouraging indolence, fatalism, and superstition. It is agreed that studying their laws contributed to the discovery of the theory of
probability,...
<!--
to topology and the theory of strategic games.
-->
But they are not regarded as capable of providing a model for depicting the real world...
<!--
or unwittingly structuring a kind of embryonic, encyclopedic knowledge of it. --->
Moreover, fatalism and strict determinism, to the degree that they deny free will and responsibility, view the entire universe as a gigantic, general, obligatory, and endless lottery...
<!--
in which each drawing inevitably implies the possibility or even the necessity of participating in the next drawing, and the next, and the next, <i>ad infinitum</i>.
-->
Also, among leisure classes whose work is insufficient to absorb their energies or occupy all their available time, games of chance frequently acquire an unexpected cultural significance which influences their art, ethics, economy, and even life experience.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It may even be asked whether this phenomenon may not be characteristic of those societies in transition no longer governed by the combined powers of mask and possession or pantomime and ecstasy but which have not yet attained a social system based upon institutions where regulated and organized competition play an essential role. What happens specifically is that peoples suddenly find themselves rid of the domination of simulation and trance through contact with cultures that, thanks to a slow and difficult evolution, have long been free of this infernal bondage. The peoples so influenced are in no way prepared to adopt the new way of life. The transition is too abrupt. In this case it is not <i>agôn</i>, but <i>alea</i> that imposes its pattern upon the society undergoing change. Submission to what is decided by lot is agreeable to these indolent and impatient beings whose basic values are no longer operable. What is even better, through resort to superstition and magic assuring them of the
favor of the powers-that-be, this immutable and simple norm
-->
<p align=justify>
[147]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
again links them to their traditions and in part restores their original world. Furthermore, under these conditions, games of chance suddenly attain unexpected significance. They tend to replace work, provided the climate is suitable and the need for food, clothing, and shelter does not force them, like others more
vulnerable, into regular activity. A drifting mass of people has no very compelling needs. It lives in the present and is protected by a government in which it takes no part. In lieu of submitting to the discipline of monotonous and discouraging labor, it devotes itself to play. In the end games of chance determine the beliefs, knowledge, habits, and ambitions of these nonchalant addicts, who no longer govern themselves and yet find it extremely difficult to adapt themselves to another culture, so that they are left to vegetate on its periphery, eternal children.
-->
<p align=justify>
I shall cite briefly several examples of the peculiar success of games of chance,...
<!--
to the point where they become habitual, routine, and second nature. They influence the life-style of an entire culture, for no one seems capable of resisting their contagion.
-->
I will begin with a case in which there has been no culture contact, and the traditional values have therefore remained intact. Playing dice is very widespread in Southern Cameroun and Northern Gabon. It is played with the aid of figures cut into the exceptionally tough wood, of the consistency of bone, from a tree that provides an oil more valuable than palm oil (<i>Baillonella Toxisperma</i>). ...
<!--
The dice have only two faces. On one side is etched a symbol whose power is stronger than that of competing signs.
-->
<p align=justify>
These quasi-heraldic designs are numerous and varied. They constitute a kind of visual encyclopedia. ...
<!--
Some represent persons, perhaps depicted in ritual, enacting a dramatic scene or engaged in the pursuit of the multiplicity of occupations involved in daily life. A child attempts to speak to a parrot, a woman traps a bird for her dinner, a man is attacked by a python, another loads his gun, three women till the soil, etc. Carved on other dice are graphic symbols depicting various plants, the female genitalia, the night sky with moon and stars.
-->
<p align=justify>
[148]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Animals—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and insects—are abundantly represented. A last series of designs refers to the things carried by the player—axes, guns, mirrors, drums, watches, or dance masks.
-->
<p align=justify>
These heraldic dice are also amulets which may help their owner gratify his least desire. He does not generally keep them at home, but in the woods, enclosed in a sack and hanging from a tree. On occasion they may be used to communicate messages.
<p align=justify>
As for the game itself, it is relatively simple. In principle, it is comparable to the game of heads or tails. ...
<!--
All players take equal risk. The outcome is decided by means of seven calabash fragments thrown with the dice. If fewer pieces of calabash have fallen "tails," the players whose dice have also fallen "tails" win the game, and vice versa.
-->
The game has caused such addiction that it had to be forbidden by the authorities. It precipitated most serious disturbances. ...
<!--
Husbands wagered their wives, chiefs played for the men under their command, brawls were frequent, and clan warfare even arose from the hot disputes engendered.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is a simple game, without refinements or continuity. ...
<!--
In addition, one easily perceives at what point it has important repercussions for culture and collective behavior, wherever it is highly regarded. All in proper proportion,
-->
...the symbolic and encyclopedic richness of the emblems is comparable to that of the capitals of Roman columns; at least it fulfills an analogous function. ...
<!--
It is also born of the necessity to carve in relief, on the side of each die, a design that will serve to differentiate the plastic arts of each tribe in the region.
-->
Above all, the ravages provoked by the passion for gambling, sometimes reaching disastrous proportions, must be stressed.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
These characteristics are not at all unique. They are also found in even more complex games of chance which exercise an analogous fascination in mixed societies, and with just as serious consequences.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
A striking example is furnished by the success of the "Chinese charade" (<i>Rifa Chifá</i>) in Cuba. This lottery, described by Lydia
<p align=justify>
[149]
<p align=justify>
Cabrera as "an incurable cancer of the economy," is played by means of a Chinese figure divided into thirty-six parts, to which are assigned an equal number of symbols...
<!--
—human, animal, or allegorical—e.g. horses, butterflies, sailors, nuns, tortoises, snails, dead men, steamships, precious stones (which may represent beautiful women), shrimp (also, the male sex), she-goats (also, a sordid affair or the female genitalia), monkeys, spiders, pipes, etc.
-->
The banker places a corresponding series of designs in a carton or box. One of these is drawn by lot, wrapped in a piece of cloth, and shown to the players. The operation is called "hanging the animal." Next, he proceeds to sell tickets, each of which bears the Chinese character standing for one or another
figurine. Meanwhile, his confederates go through the streets taking bets. At a designated time, the emblem is unwrapped, and the winners receive thirty times what they have wagered. The banker gives ten per cent of his profits to his agents.
<p align=justify>
<!--\
The game thus turns out to be a more embellished version of roulette. However, -->
...while in roulette all numerical combinations are possible, the symbols of <i>Rifa Chiffá</i> are assembled according to mysterious affinities. In effect, each possesses or does not possess one or more companions and valets. Thus, the horse has the precious stone for a companion and the peacock for a servant;...
<!--
the big fish has the elephant for a companion, but the tortoise is his valet. Conversely, the shrimp has the deer for a companion, but no servant. The deer has three companions—the shrimp, the goat, and the spider—but has no valet, etc.
-->
Naturally, it is necessary to play the chosen symbol, his companion, and his valet at the same time.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In addition, the thirty-six lottery emblems are grouped in seven unequal series (<i>quadrillas</i>)—merchants, gentlemen, drunkards, priests, beggars, cavaliers, and women. Moreover, the principles dominating the division now seem more obscure. For example, the priest series is composed of the big fish, tortoise, pipe, eel, cock, nun, and cat. The drunkard series contains the dead man, snail, peacock, and little fish. The universe of the game is ruled by this strange classification.
-->
At the beginning
<p align=justify>
[150]
<p align=justify>
of each game, after having "hung the animal," the banker announces a charade (<i>charada</i>) intended to guide (or mislead) the participants. What is involved is an intentionally ambiguous statement such as the following:
"A man on horseback is riding very slowly. He is not stupid, but drunk, and he and his companion make a lot of money," As a result, the player imagines that he ought to play the drunkard or cavalier series. He can also bet on the animal commanded by one or the other. However, there is no doubt another, less clearly expressed word which provides the clue to the charade.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Another time the banker declares, "I want to do you a favor. The elephant kills the pig. The tiger suggests it. The deer goes to sell it and carries the package." An experienced player explains his reasoning:
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
The toad is a sorcerer, the deer is the sorcerer's helper. He carries the evil package which contains the black magic that an enemy has contrived against someone. In this case, the tiger against the elephant. The deer leaves with the package in order to place it where the sorcerer told him to. Quite clever, isn't it? Very clever! Thirty-one, the deer, will win, because the deer starts off at a run.
</font>
</blockquote>
-->
The game is Chinese in origin. In China, an enigmatic allusion to the traditional texts takes the place of the charade. A scholar, after the drawing, was charged with justifying the true solution, supported by citations. In Cuba, a comprehensive knowledge of Negro beliefs is needed for the correct interpretation of the charades. ...
<!--
The banker announces: "A bird pecks and
goes away." Nothing is more transparent. The dead fly. The soul of a dead man is comparable to a bird because it can go anywhere at will, in the form of an owl. These are souls in pain, famished and vindictive. "Pecks and goes away," i.e. causes the sudden death of a living person who was suspicious. It is therefore necessary to play 8, the dead man.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The "dog that bites everybody" is the language of attack and calumny; the "light that shines everywhere" is 11, the cock that crows at dawn; the "king who can do everything" is num-
-->
<p align=justify>
[151]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
ber 2, the butterfly who is also money; the "clown who paints himself in secret," 8, the dead man covered with a white shroud. This time the explanation is valid only for laymen. In reality, initiation is required (<i>ñampe</i> or <i>ñañigo</i> muerto). In fact, the priest, in a secret ceremony, draws ritualistic signs with white chalk on the face, hands, chest, arms, and legs of the initiate.
-->
<p align=justify>
A complicated and fantastic system of dream interpretation is also of help in guessing the lucky number. Its combinations are infinite. The facts of experience are assigned prophetic numbers. These go up to 100, thanks to a book kept at the Charade bank, which can be consulted by telephone. This repertory of orthodox concordances gives rise to a symbolic language considered "very
valuable for penetrating life's mysteries." In any case, the result is that the image frequently replaces the number. ...
<!--
At the home of his wife's uncle, Alejo Carpentier sees a young black boy adding 2+9+4+8+3+5=31 The boy does not enunciate the numbers but says, "Butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer." Again, to indicate that 12 divided by 2 equals 6, he says, "Whore by butterfly equals tortoise." The signs and concordance of the game are extrapolated to all knowledge.
-->
<p align=justify>
The Chinese Charade is widely diffused, even though forbidden by Article 355 of the Cuban Penal Code. Since 1879, numerous protests against its evils have been made. Above all, there are workers who risk not only what little money they have but also what is needed to feed their families. Of necessity, they do not play much, but persistently, since they hang "the animal" four to six times daily. It is a game in which fraud is relatively easy. ...
<!--
Since the banker is familiar with the list of bets, nothing prevents him from cleverly changing, at the moment of such discovery, the symbol on which bets have dangerously accumulated for another which has been almost completely ignored.
-->
<p align=justify>
In any event, whether honestly or dishonestly, the bankers rapidly grow rich. ...
<!--
It is said that, in the last century, they earned
-->
<p align=justify>
[152]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
up to 40,000 pesos daily. One of them returned to his country with a capital of 200,000 pesos in gold. It is estimated that today [1957] in Havana there are five large and more than twelve small Charade organizations. More than $100,000 per day is bet there.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
On the neighboring island of Puerto Rico, the Planning Board estimated the sums invested in various games in 1957 at $100 million per annum, about half the island's budget, of which $75 million was for legal gambling (state lottery, cockfighting, horseracing, roulette, etc.). The report said: "When gambling reaches these proportions it undoubtedly constitutes a serious national social problem . . . [It] injures personal savings, adversely affects business operations, and stimulates the person to put more trust in gambling than in constructive work . . ." Impressed by these conclusions Governor Luis Muñoz Marin decided to re-enforce the gambling laws, in order to keep gambling expenditures during the next decade to proportions less disastrous
to the national economy.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
In Brazil, the <i>Jogo do Bicho</i> or animal game has the same characteristics as the Chinese Charade in Cuba. ...
<!--
It is a semi-clandestine lottery utilizing symbols and multiple combinations, with an enormous organization and daily bets absorbing an important part of the little money at the disposal of the lower strata of the population. In addition, the Brazilian game has the advantage of being a perfect illustration of the relationship between <i>alea</i> and superstition. It also has such important effects upon the economic order that I feel justified in reproducing the description of it that I once published for another purpose.
<p align=justify>
In its present form this game goes back to about 1880. Its origin is attributed to Baron de Drummond's custom of each week affixing the effigy of some animal to the entrance of the zoological garden. The public was invited to guess which animal would be chosen each time. A pari mutuel was thus born which survived its source and which permanently associated the figures of the posted animals
with a series of numbers. The game was soon integrated with the pari mutuel on the winning numbers of the federal lottery, analogous to
-->
<p align=justify>
[153]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
the <i>quiniela</i> of neighboring countries. The first hundred numbers were divided into groups of four and attributed to twenty-five animals ranged fairly close in alphabetical order, from the eagle (<i>aigle</i>), numbers 1 to 4, to the cow (<i>vache</i>), numbers 97 to 100. Thenceforth, the game no longer underwent appreciable modification.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The combinations are infinite. It is played as a unit or by the dozen, hundred, or thousand, i.e. by the last digit or the two, three, or four last digits of the winning number in the daily lottery. (Since the federal lottery is no longer daily but weekly, a false, wholly theoretical lottery, without tickets or prizes, is drawn, and serves only for the purposes of the <i>Bicho</i> players). Several animals may also be played simultaneously, i.e. several groups of four numbers, and each combination may be inverted or reshuffled, i.e. one may bet not only on the number itself but on any number composed of
the same digits. For example, to play 327 <i>inverted</i> means that one may win just as well with 372, 273, 237, 723, and 732. One can easily imagine that calculating one's winnings, always rigorously proportionate to the risk involved, is not a simple matter. As a result, a subtle knowledge of the laws of arithmetic is spread through the population. A person who can scarcely read or write solves, with disconcerting accuracy and rapidity, problems that would demand the sustained attention of a mathematician untrained in this kind of
calculation.
-->
<p align=justify>
<i>Jogo do Bicho</i> not only favors the usual arithmetic exercises but also encourages superstition. In fact, it is bound to a system of forecasting the future through dream interpretation, with its own code, classics, and expert interpreters.
<!--
The dreams instruct the player which animal he should choose. However,
-->
...the animal of which one has dreamt is not always the one to play. ...
<!--
It is prudent first to leaf through an appropriate manual, a key to special dreams, with a title such as <i>Interpretação des sonhos para o Jogo do Bicho</i>. Here one learns the proper correspondences.
-->
Whoever dreams of a flying cow must play the eagle, not the cow. If one dreams of a cat falling off a roof, he must bet on the butterfly (because a real cat does not fall off a roof). ...
<!--
To dream of a stick means to play the cobra (who rears up like a stick). Whoever sees a mad dog in his dreams will play the lion (equally brave), etc. -->
Sometimes the relationship is obscure,...
<!--
e.g. to dream of a dead man means to play the elephant. It may happen that the connection is derived from satiric folklore, e.g. to dream of a Portuguese is to play the ass-->
The more conscientious are not content with a mechanical correspondence. ...
<!--
They consult soothsayers and witches who apply their gifts and
-->
</blockquote>
How <i>literary</i> of them.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[154]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
knowledge to the particular case in question and act as infallible
oracles.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
Frequently the dream goes beyond the animal level and furnishes the desired number directly. A man dreams of one of his friends and plays his telephone number. He witnesses a traffic accident and plays the car's license number, that of the police car, or a combination of the two. Rhyme and rhythm are no less important than chance signs. According to one significant anecdote a priest, in giving absolution to a dying man, pronounces the ritualistic words:
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph." The dying man sits up and shouts: "Eagle, ostrich, crocodile," <i>Bicho</i> animals which in Portuguese (<i>Aguia</i>, <i>Avestruz</i>, <i>Jacaré</i>) have a vague connection with the former
sequence. Examples can easily be multiplied almost to infinity. A servant upsets a vase and the water spills on the ground, The shape of the puddle of water is interpreted as resembling a <i>Bicho</i> animal. The ability to discover useful connections is regarded as a precious gift. More than one Brazilian cites a case in which a domestic, having become indispensable to his masters by his skill in analyzing <i>Bicho</i> combinations or by his knowledge of omens, has come to dominate the household.
-->
<p align=justify>
Theoretically the game of animals is forbidden in all the states of Brazil. In fact it is more or less tolerated according to the mood of the governor of the state or the caprice and policies of local officials,...
<!--
the chief of police in particular. Whether the game be mildly disapproved or secretly protected, it savors of forbidden fruit and remains clandestinely organized, even when such discretion is not justified by official attitudes. Even better,
-->
...
public opinion, though continuously obsessed with the game, nevertheless seems to regard it as a sin...
<!--
—no doubt venial and pardonable, analogous to tobacco, for example—and regards indulgence in it as a reprehensible activity.
-->
Politicians often organize, exploit, or profit from the game, and yet do not fail to fulminate against it in their speeches. ...
<!--
The army, which is quite moralistic and has kept alive the influence of Auguste Comte and positivism, regards <i>Bicho</i> as evil. During the <i>macumbas</i>, seances involving possession by spirits and esteemed by the Negro population as well as in spiritualist circles, those who demand prognostications for <i>Bicho</i> from those possessed or from the turning tables are expelled. From one pole to the other, in the Brazilian spiritual world, there is general condemnation of the game.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The constantly precarious situation of the game, the general disapproval to which it is subjected by those addicted to it, and above all, the fact that it cannot be officially recognized, has a consequence that rarely fails to surprise its clientele—viz. the scrupulous honesty
-->
<p align=justify>
[155]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
of those who take the bets. Not one of them, we are assured, has ever diverted even one penny entrusted to him. Except for the wealthy players who telephone their orders, one slips a folded piece of paper containing the amount— sometimes considerable—of the bet into the hand of the bookie on a street corner, together with the combination to be played and a code name chosen specifically for this occasion. The receiver passes the slip of paper to a colleague, and the latter passes it to a third man, so that in case of a police search nothing may be found on the person of the man caught red-handed. That evening or the next day, each winner returns to the place agreed upon and utters the code name that he used in placing his bet. The bookie at once discreetly passes him an envelope so labeled, containing the exact sum due the elated bettor.
-->
<p align=justify>
The player would have no recourse against the dishonest <i>Bichero</i>, if he did not find him there, but that does not occur. It is astonishing and admirable to find
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
more honesty
</mark>
in this equivocal game in which tempting sums continuously pass through so many poor hands than in other domains...
<!--
where Brazilians are currently complaining of a degree of moral laxity. However -->
the reason for this is obvious. Without trust, this kind of traffic would absolutely fail to survive. ...
<!--
If the system were broken, it would crumble. Where neither control nor complaint is conceivable,
-->
...good faith is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
<p align=justify>
<br>
...
<!--
According to relatively modest estimates, 60 to 70 per cent of the Brazilian population plays <i>Bicho</i>, and each one spends about 1 per cent of his monthly income per day on the game, so that at the end of the month, if he never won, he would have lost about 30 per cent of his income. This applies only to the average player. For the inveterate player the percentage is much greater. In extreme cases the gambler devotes almost all his resources to the game, and for the rest lives as a parasite upon others or resorts to out-and-out begging.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
...
It should therefore be no cause for surprise if, despite the legal ban, the animal game represents a force or resource that the powers that be must take into consideration. On one occasion political prisoners demanded and obtained the right to play <i>Bicho</i> in the jail where they were being detained. The Department of Social Welfare of the state of São Paulo, created in 1931 without a budgetary appropriation, for a long time functioned solely with the subsidies
allotted to it by the local <i>Bicho</i> chiefs. These subsidies were sufficient to support a large staff and minister to the incessant demands of the needy. The organization of gambling is very hierarchical.
-->
<p align=justify>
[156]
<p align=justify>
...
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[161]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
APPENDIX II
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
Psychological and Mathematical
<br>
Approaches
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
The world of games is so varied and complex that there are numerous ways of studying it. Psychology, sociology, anecdotage, pedagogy, and mathematics so
divide its domain that the unity of the subject is no longer perceptible. ...
<!--
Not only are such works as <i>Homo Ludens</i> by Huizinga, <i>Jeu de l'Enfant by Jean Chateau</i>, and <i>Theory of Games and Economic Behavior</i> by von Neumann and Morgenstern not aimed at the same readers, but they don't even seem to be discussing the same subject. One may finally ask to what extent semantic problems cause different and nearly incompatible researches to be viewed as at heart concerning the same specific activity. It has even been doubted that there are any common characteristics on the basis of which play may be defined in order to facilitate a cooperative approach to studying it.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
If, in ordinary experience, the domain of play remains auton-
-->
<p align=justify>
[162]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
omous despite all these attempts, it is manifestly lost to scientific investigation. It is not merely a question of different approaches arising from the diversity of disciplines. The facts studied in the name of play are so heterogeneous that one is led to speculate that the word "play" is perhaps merely a trap, encouraging by its seeming generality tenacious illusions as to
the supposed kinship between disparate forms of behavior.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It may be of some interest to show the stages, or on occasion the hazards, that have led to so paradoxical a subdivision of the subject. In fact, this is apparent from the very beginning. The player of leapfrog, dominoes, or kite-flying knows in all three cases equally that he is playing. However, only child psychologists concern themselves with leapfrog (or the game of prisoner's base or marbles), only sociologists analyze kite-flying, and only mathematicians study dominoes (or roulette or poker). I find it normal that the latter have no interest in blindman's buff or tag, which do not lend themselves to equations. I find less comprehensible Jean Chateau's ignoring dominoes and kite-flying. I ask myself in vain why historians and sociologists in fact refuse to study games of chance. To be more precise, if in this latter case I am puzzled about the reason for such avoidance, I can compensate by speculating as to the motives involved. As will be shown, these hold for a large part of the biological or pedagogical reservations of the scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of games. If anecdotal accounts are excepted, referring, as they do, to playthings rather than games, the study of games has profited most notably from work in such independent disciplines as psychology and mathematics, the principal contributions of which it is fitting to examine.
-->
<p>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
1. Psychological Approaches
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
Schiller is surely one of the first, if not the first, to stress the exceptional importance of play for the history of culture. In the fifteenth of his "Aesthetical Letters and Essays" he writes:
<br><br>
[163]
<br><br>
"For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and <i>he is only completely a man when he plays."</i> Even more significantly, further on in the same text, he even suspects that it may be possible to deduce the character of different cultures from their play. He holds that in comparing "the race tracks of London, the bull fights in Madrid, the exhibitions in Paris, the regattas in Venice, the animal fights in Vienna, and the revelry on the Roman Corso," it
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ought not be difficult
</mark>
to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
determine
</mark>
"the various nuances of taste among these different nations."
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
We would do better to say, actually, that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it ought
</mark>
to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
be difficult
</mark>
to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
determine
</mark>
this; it very well
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ought
</mark>
to involve a lot more elbow grease than does mere
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
compari</mark>son;
it
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
ought
</mark>
<i>not</i> be so elementary to reduce
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cultures
</mark>
to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
taste
</mark>
.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
However, occupied as he is with isolating the essence of art from play, he goes on, and is content merely to foreshadow the sociology of games implicit in his sentence. It does not matter, because the question has at least been posed, and play taken up in earnest. Schiller emphasizes the joyous exuberance of the player and his latitude of choice. Play and art are born of a surplus of vital energy, not needed by the adult or child for the satisfaction of his immediate needs, and therefore available for the free and pleasant transformation into dancing.
-->
According to Spencer, "Play is a dramatization of adult activity." Wundt, decidedly and emphatically in error, states, "Play is the child of
work. There is no form of play that is not modeled upon some form of serious employment, which naturally precedes it in time." This view was very influential. Misled by it, ethnographers and historians devoted themselves, with varying degrees of success, to showing that various religious practices or obsolete magic rituals had survived in children's games.
<p align=justify>
The idea of free and spontaneous play was taken up by Karl Groos in his work, <i>The Play of Animals</i>. The writer distinguishes play as joy of being from play as motive for culture.
<!--
He explains it through its power of suddenly and freely interrupting an activity that has already begun. Lastly,
-->
...he defines it as pure activity, without past or future, and freed of worldly pressures and constraints. ...
<!--
Play is a creation of which the player is master. Removed from stern reality, it seems like a universe that is an end in itself, and only exists as long as it is voluntarily
-->
<p align=justify>
[164]
<p align=justify>
<!--
accepted as such. However,
-->
...because Groos first studied animals (although he was already thinking of man), he was led, several years later, when he studied human play (<i>The Play of Man</i>), to insist upon its instinctive and spontaneous aspects, and neglect its purely intellectual possibilities,...
<!--
possibilities which can be illustrated in numerous cases.
-->
<p align=justify>
Moreover, he too conceived of the games of a young animal as a kind of joyous training for its adult life. Groos came to see in play the guarantor of youth:
"Animals also do not play because they are young; they are young because they have to play." Accordingly, he tried to show how play activity assures young animals greater skill in hunting their prey or escaping their enemies and accustoms them to fighting among themselves,...
<!--
in anticipation of the moment when they will have to battle over females. From this he derived an ingenious classification of games, very appropriate for his purpose but with the unfortunate consequence of inflicting a parallel dichotomy upon his study of human games. He therefore distinguished play activity involving (<i>a</i>) the sensory apparatus (the sense of touch, heat, taste, odor, hearing, color, shape, movement, etc.); (<i>b</i>) the motor apparatus (feeling about, destruction and analysis, construction and synthesis, games involving patience, throwing, throwing and striking or pushing, rolling, turning, or sliding movements, throwing at a target, catching moving objects); (<i>c</i>) intelligence, emotion, and will power (games of recognition, memory, imagination, attention, reason, surprise, fear, etc.). He then went on to what he called secondary drives, those which are derived from the instincts of fighting, sex, and imitation.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
This long repertory is a wonderful demonstration of how all the sensations or emotions that man can experience, all his movements and thoughts, give rise to games, but Groos sheds no light upon the nature or structure of games. He does not concern himself with grouping them according to their proper affinities, and does not seem to perceive that they involve for the most part several senses or functions at the same time. Basically, he is content to classify them according to the table
-->
<p align=justify>
[165]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
of contents of the type of psychological treatise popular in his time, or rather he confines himself to showing how man's senses and faculties also permit a kind of activity that is disinterested and without immediate utility and which, therefore, belongs to the domain of play and serves the unique purpose of preparing man for his future responsibilities. The author also omits
reference to games of chance, and has no qualms about this, since they do not exist among animals, and they do not prepare one for any serious task.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
After reading the works of Karl Groos, it is possible to go on ignoring or minimizing the fact that play frequently, perhaps necessarily, involves
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
rules
</mark>
and even rules of a very special kind—arbitrary, imperious, and valid for a time and space determined in advance. One is reminded that Huizinga's special
merit was to have stressed this last characteristic and to have shown how exceptionally fruitful it is for the development of culture. Jean Piaget before him, in two lectures delivered in 1930 at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, had strongly emphasized the opposition of imaginary and regulated
games in the child. One is also reminded of the significance he very properly attributed to regulated play for the moral development of the child.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Can this purported
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
significance
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
be squared with the previous vignette on <i>Bicho</i>, whereby wide participation and wide moral condemnation exist side by side?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Relatedly, it is curious to recall here that in <i>Bicho</i>,
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
good faith is no longer a luxury, but a necessity</mark>,
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
for
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Without trust, this kind of traffic would absolutely fail to survive
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Thus the more interesting questions about the
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
moral development
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
of children:
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
are such rules as exist are made and imposed by the adults or by the children themselves?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
also,
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
what (if anything) has the play-<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">moral</mark>ity
to do with the life-morality?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The <i>Bicho</i> vignette is not about children or development, but nonetheless it smuggles in some skeptical answers to these questions. Here honesty arises out of necessity. Yet true necessity would seem to be anathema to any kind of "play." Play may be "necessary" in some broader sense, but it is because of this and not in spite of it that no specific form of play can claim the same necessity, at least not when there clearly are so many to choose from. (This paradox deserves academic branding and deployment, if it has not already received them.)
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
So, there is no "necessity" to play <i>Bicho</i>, not in any abstract sense; yet in a world where <i>Bicho</i> IS played, and where it enjoys fanatical participation, there emerges (I assume this is the point?) a kind of "necessity" which is no less powerfully felt than the kind that might attach to, say, child-rearing or subsistence.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
What to make of this play-honesty, then, vis-a-vis "moral development?" Clearly it is "real," but it is also absurd; it is lived and experienced, but also highly compartmentalized. This honesty's ladder is leaning on the wrong wall. Also, it is borne of "necessity," which means it really represents no "moral development" per se aside from the "developments" of circumstance. Or at least that is where the above account places it: at the end of a process rather than the beginning or middle.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Given only this account, one could be forgiven for imagining that people are not nearly so honest in their dealings outside of <i>Bicho</i> as they are within it. Conversely, the phrase
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
moral development of the child
</mark>
precisely implies a carryover effect. It implies that some moral value is <i>not</i> merely compartmentalized to the play situation. Again, the <i>Bicho</i> vignette is not about children. Still, it points up a certain absurdity in ascribing something as lofty as "moral development" to (literally) child's play, and meanwhile the adults, of whom we can at least say here are "playing for real," are idle at best, degenerate at worst, and yet also, <i>concurrently</i> but <i>not integrally</i>, demonstrating rare "honesty."
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
There is more to be unpacked here than the mere petty hypocrisy of moralists, though that is certainly detectable and it could lead to some conclusions with broader applicability, i.e. to the social standing of all kinds of activities that seem not to be particularly productive.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Speculatively at least, I think it's fair to wonder if the
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
significance
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
of
<p style="margin-left: 3%; margin-right: 50%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
regulated play for the moral
<br>
development of the child
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
is just one more sociological answer in search of a question; if alongside "development" there is an "emergence" of something determined; if rather than (or alongside) games teaching honesty, honest people play games. They are <i>able</i> to play competitive games (agon) in fact because, as Caillois emphasizes several times, this kind of play disintegrates in absence of agreed-upon boundaries. Finding no cheaters where they were expecting many, breathless arrivistes can opine that there must be some "moral development" inherent in competitive play. If I'm in no position to render any kind of informed judgment on such a broad question, that's because it's easy to find writers merely asserting one or the other thesis but more difficult to find (perhaps also to understand) good science on the question. What little I've stumbled on seems rather blatantly to run afoul of Taleb's "silent evidence" problem.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
To wit, it could be also that the cheaters and deadbeats have already been kicked out by the time the sociologists show up; a confounding factor in the chicken-or-egg question, certainly, but hardly one which argues for a "development" and against an "emergence." I suspect Taleb is useful here too, in calling out social scientists for abusing the notion of "anecdotal" evidence. Self-policing cannot be dismissed as anecdotal, because it's the only way any social institution manages to function at all. Without it there would be nothing to study.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Also p. 166 below—"play is a test rather than an exercise"
<br>
This is the direction I would lean.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br><br><br><br><br>
Then again, neither Piaget nor Huizinga leaves any room for games of chance,...
<!--
which are also excluded from the noteworthy researches of Jean Chateau. To be sure, Piaget and Chateau only discuss children's games, and even more precisely, games of West European children in the first half of the twentieth
century, games that are played mostly by school children during their recreation periods.
-->
It is understandable that games of chance are almost fated to be sidetracked, for they are certainly not encouraged by educators. ...
<!--
However, aside from dice, teetotums, dominoes, and cards, which Chateau omits as adult games which children could be taught to play by their families, there is still the game of marbles which is not always a game of skill.
-->
<p align=justify>
[166]
<p align=justify>
<!--
In fact,
-->
...marbles are especially peculiar in that they are both medium of exchange and game. ...
<!--
Players win or lose them. They also quickly become a true monetary system. They are exchanged for candy, penknives, slingshots, whistles, school supplies, help with homework, a service to be rendered, and all kinds of valuable items. Marbles even differ in value according to whether they are made of steel, earthenware, stone, or glass. For it so happens that children bet them on games of "odds or evens," such as morra, which on a children's level involve true reversals of fortune. Chateau cites at least one of these games, yet he does not hesitate to explain its chance element—i.e. risk, <i>alea</i>, betting—as the result of a children's game, in order better to stress the essentially active character of the pleasure in the game.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
This approach would not have unhappy consequences if Jean Chateau had not, at the end of his book, attempted a classification of games which resulted in a serious omission.
-->
In deliberately ignoring games of chance, it begs an important question, i.e. whether the child is or is not aware of the lure of chance, or whether he seldom plays games of chance in school because such games are not tolerated there. I believe that there is little doubt as to the answer. The child becomes aware of chance very early. It remains to be determined at what age he does so, and how he accommodates the verdict of chance, which is unjust in principle, to his very positive and stern sense of justice.
<p align=justify>
Chateau's aim is genetic and pedagogic at the same time.
<!--
First, he is concerned with the eras in which each type of game originated and spread. Simultaneously he tries to determine the positive influence of each kind of game. He applies himself to showing to what degree they contribute to the formation of the future adult personality. From this point of view
-->
...he has no trouble in demonstrating, contrary to Karl Groos, how play is a <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
test
</mark>
rather than an
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
exercise
</mark>
. The child does not train himself for a definite task. Thanks to play, he acquires a more extensive capacity to surmount obstacles or face up to difficulties. ...
<!--
Thus, while there is nothing in real life like the game of
"winner-take-
-->
<p align=justify>
[167]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
all," there is an advantage in possessing quick and controlled reflexes.
-->
<p align=justify>
In a general way, play is like education of the body, character, or mind,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
without
</mark>
the goal's being
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
predetermined
</mark>
. From this viewpoint,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the further removed play is from reality, the greater is its educational value.
</mark>
For it does not teach facts, but rather develops aptitudes.
<p align=justify>
However, pure games of chance do not develop any physical or mental aptitude in the player, since he remains essentially passive. Their moral consequences are also quite formidable, because they detract from work and effort in creating hope of sudden and considerable wealth. That—if so desired—is a reason for banning them from school (but not from a classification system).
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Well okay, he sides with the moralizers in the end. But there is a bit too much of both consequentialism and projection in this assessment.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br><br>
<center>
%%
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
I sometimes ask myself whether logic has not been pushed to an extreme. Play is not exercise, it is not even a test or activity, except by accretion. The faculties developed by it surely benefit from this supplemental training, which in addition is free, intense, pleasing, inventive, and protected. However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the proper function of play is never to develop capacities. Play is an end in itself.
</mark>
For the rest, the aptitudes it exercises are the very same as are used for study and serious adult activities. If these capacities are dormant or feeble, the child can neither study nor play, for he is then unable to adapt to a new situation, concentrate. Or apply himself to study. ...
<!--
The observations of A. Brauner are more convincing in this respect. Play is in no way a refuge for the defective or the abnormal. It repels them just as much as work does. These deviant children are revealed to be equally incapable of absorbing themselves with some degree of continuity or application in play activity as in a real-life apprenticeship. For them, play is reduced to a simple, occasional prolongation of movement, a pure, uncontrolled propulsion, disproportionate and unintelligent (pushing the marble or the ball with which others play, getting in the way, annoying, jostling, etc.). At the moment
-->
<p align=justify>
[168]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
the educator succeeded in giving them respect for rules—or better still, the desire to make up rules—they were cured.
-->
<p align=justify>
There is scarcely any doubt that the desire to freely respect an agreed-upon rule is essential. ...
<!--
In fact, Chateau, following Piaget, recognizes the importance of this point as well, in that he begins by dividing games into two classes, those with rules and those without. For the latter he condenses Groos' contributon without adding anything new. For regulated games he proves much more instructive. The distinction he establishes between figurative games (imitation and illusion), objective games (construction and work), and abstract games (arbitrary rules, prowess, and competition) no doubt corresponds to reality. It is also possible to agree with him that figurative games lead to art, objective games anticipate work, and competitive games foreshadow sports.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Chateau completes his classification with a category that combines those competitive games requiring a certain amount of cooperation with the dances and mock ceremonials in which the movements of the participants must be coordinated. Such a grouping seems hardly homogeneous and directly contradicts
the previously established principle which opposes games involving illusion to games with rules.
-->
Playing laundress, grocer, or soldier is always an improvisation. To make believe that one is a sick patient, a baker, aviator, or cowboy involves continuous inventiveness. To play prisoner's base or tag, to say nothing of football, checkers, or chess, presupposes, on the contrary, respect for precise rules that allow the winner to be decided. ...
<!--
To classify representational and competitive games under the same rubric, merely because both require players on the same side to cooperate, is basically explained by the writer's preoccupation with distinguishing various levels and age grades of play. Sometimes a complex of games based upon simple rivalry or competition is indeed involved, and at other times a symmetrical complex of figurative games founded upon simulation.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Both these complications result in the intervention of the team spirit, which obliges players to cooperate, coordinate their
-->
<p align=justify>
[169]
<p align=justify>
<!--
movements, and play assigned parts in a maneuver of the whole. The more basic relationships remain no less manifestly vertical. Chateau always goes from the simple to the complex, because he is primarily trying to establish categories compatible with the time of childhood. However, the latter merely complicate essentally independent structures.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Figurative and competitive games correspond almost exactly to those I have classified in terms of <i>mimicry</i> and <i>agôn</i> respectively. I have stated why Chateau's classification makes no mention of games of chance. At least there is some space devoted to games of vertigo, described as "games of passion," examples of which are descending a slope, spinning a top, and running
(until out of breath). To be sure, there is in this activity a hint of vertigo, but games of vertigo, to really merit being called games, must be more precise and determinate and better adapted to their proper goal, which is to provoke a slight, temporary, and therefore pleasant disturbance of perception and equilibrium, viz., in tobogganing, swinging, or even in the Haitian <i>mais d'or</i>. Chateau properly alludes to swinging but interprets it as voluntary activity to counteract fear. To be sure, vertigo presupposes fear or, more precisely, feelings of panic, but the latter attracts and fascinates one; it is pleasurable. It is not so much a question of triumphing over fear as of the voluptuous experience of fear, thrills, and shock that causes a momentary loss of self-control.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
Thus,
-->
...games of vertigo are no better analyzed by psychologists than are games of chance. Huizinga, who studied adult games, pays no attention to them. He no doubt holds them in disdain, because it seems impossible to attribute a cultural or educational value to games of vertigo. Huizinga derives civilization, to whatever degree necessary, from invention, respect for rules, and fair competition, just as does Chateau for the essential qualities needed by man for building his personality. The ethical creativity of limited and regulated conflict and the cultural creativity of magical games are doubted by no one. However, the pursuit of vertigo and chance is of ill repute. These games seem sterile—if not fatal—marks of some obscure and contagious malediction.
<p align=justify>
[170]
<p align=justify>
They are regarded as destructive to the mores. According to a popular view, culture ought to defend itself against seduction by them, rather than profit from their controversial revenues.
<p>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
2. Mathematical Approaches
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
Games of vertigo and games of chance have been implicitly boycotted by sociologists and educators. The study of vertigo has been left to physicians and the computation of chance to mathematicians. ...
<!--
This new kind of research is certainly indispensable, but it distracts attention from the nature of play. The study of the functioning of the semicircular canals is an inadequate explanation of the vogue for swings, toboggans, skiing, and the vertigo-inducing rides at amusement parks. Nor is it an explanation of another order of activity that also presupposes the powers of panic involved in play, viz., the whirling dervishes of the Middle East or the spiral descent of the Mexican <i>voladores</i>. On the other hand, the development of the calculus of probability is no substitute for a sociology of lotteries, gambling houses, or racetracks. Mathematical studies afford no information about the psychology of the player, since they must examine all possible responses to a given situation.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Sometimes mathematical calculation is used to determine the banker's margin of security, and at other times to show the player the best way to play, or to indicate the odds on each possible alternative. It should be remembered that a problem of this kind gave rise to the calculus of probabilities. The Chevalier
de Méré had calculated that in the game of dice, in a series of 24 throws, as there were only 21 possible combinations, the double six had more chances than not of turning up. However, experience proved the contrary, and he posed this problem to Pascal. This resulted in a long correspondence between Pascal and Fermat, who was to open a new mathematical path. This was incidentally to show Méré that it was indeed scientifi-
-->
<p align=justify>
[171]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
cally advantageous to bet against the appearance of two sixes in a series of 24 throws.
-->
<p align=justify>
Paralleling their work on games of chance, mathematicians have for a long time been conducting research of a very different kind. They applied themselves to the calculus of numbers in which chance plays no part, but which can be made part of a complete, generalized theory. ...
<!--
What are specifically involved are the many difficult puzzles known as mathematical recreations. Studying them has more than once put mathematicians on the road to important discoveries. For example, there is the problem (unsolved) of the four colors, the problem of the bridges of Koenigsberg, the three houses and the three springs (unsolvable on a plane, but solvable on an enclosed surface, such as in a ring), and the problem of the fifteen girls out walking.
-->
Certain traditional games such as sliding-part puzzles or ring puzzles are also based upon problems or combinations of the same kind,...
<!--
from which the theory of topology, as established by Janirewski at the end of the nineteenth century, has arisen.
-->
Recently, by combining the calculus of probabilities with topology, mathematicians have founded a new science, with many varied applications—the theory of strategic games.
<p align=justify>
Here the point is for players who are adversaries to defend themselves; i.e. in successive situations they are required to make a rational choice and appropriate decisions. ...
<!--
This type of game serves as a fitting model for questions that commonly arise in economic, commercial, political, or military domains.
-->
It originates out of the desire to find a necessary, scientific solution beyond empirical dispute but at least approximately quantifiable. ...
<!--
They began with the simplest situations: heads or tails, paperrock-scissors the paper beats the rock in enveloping it, the rock beats the scissors in breaking them, the scissors beat the paper in cutting it), extremely simplified poker, airplane duels, etc.
-->
Psychological elements such as ruse and bluff enter into the calculations. ...
<!--
Ruse is defined as "the perspicacity of a player in predicting his adversaries' behavior," and bluff is the response to this ruse, i.e. "sometimes the art of disguising our information
-->
<p align=justify>
[172]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
from an adversary, deceiving him as to our intentions, or finally, making him underestimate our ability.
-->
<p align=justify>
Nevertheless doubt remains with regard to the practical implications of such speculation, and even as to its utility outside of pure mathematics. These calculations are based upon two postulates that are indispensable for rigorous deduction, and which, by definition, are never encountered in the continuous and infinite universe of reality. The first is the possibility of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
total information
</mark>
, using all the relevant data. The second is the competition between adversaries who always take the initiative with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
full knowledge
</mark>
of causes, in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
anticipation of an exact result
</mark>
, and are supposed to choose
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the better solution
</mark>
. In reality, however, on the one hand, the relevant data cannot be enumerated <i>a priori</i>, and on the other hand, the role of error, caprice, dumb luck, arbitrary and inexplicable decisions, preposterous superstition, and even a deliberate desire to lose, on the part of the enemy, cannot be eliminated. <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
There is no motive that can absolutely be excluded from the absurd human universe.
</mark>
Mathematically, these anomalies do not engender new difficulties; they merely lead back to a prior case, already resolved. Humanly, however, for the concrete player, it is not the same, because the entire interest of the game lies precisely in this inextricable concatenation of possibilities.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Theoretically
</mark>
, in a pistol duel, where both adversaries are walking toward each other, if one knows the range and accuracy of the weapons, the distance, visibility, relative skill of the duelists and their degree of calm or nervousness, and provided it is possible to quantify these varied elements, it can be calculated at what moment it is best for each of them to squeeze the trigger. It is a matter even for aleatory speculation, in that the facts are outside of agreed-upon limits. However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
in practice
</mark>
, it is clear that calculus is impossible, because what is needed is the complete analysis of an inexhaustible situation. One of the adversaries may be nearsighted or suffer from astigmatism. He may be distraught or neurotic; a wasp may sting him; he may stumble over a root. Finally, he may want to die. Analysis is
<p align=justify>
[173]
<p align=justify>
never adequate, except for the bare bones of the problem. Reasoning becomes fallacious as soon as the problem's original complexity is discovered.
<p align=justify>
In some American stores, during sales, the articles are sold the first day at 20 per cent off list, 30 per cent the second, and 50 per cent off the third day. The longer the customer waits, the more he saves on his purchase. But at the same time his possibility of choice is diminishing, and the desired commodity may no longer be available. In principle, if the facts to be taken into account are limited, it is possible to calculate on what day it is better to buy such and such an article in terms of its relative desirability. However, it is likely that each customer makes his purchase consistent with his character—without waiting, it he regards obtaining the desired object as primary, and at the last moment, if he is trying to spend as little as possible.
<br><br>
Herein lies the irreducible element in play, inaccessible to mathematics. For one does not play to win as a sure thing.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The pleasure of the game is inseparable from the risk of losing.
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Whenever calculation arrives at a scientific theory of the game,
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the interest of the player disappears together with the uncertainty of the outcome.
</mark>
All variables are known, as are conceivable consequences. In card-playing, the game ends as soon as there is no longer any uncertainty about the cards dealt. In chess, the player gives up as soon as he becomes aware that the outcome is inevitable. In the games that they are addicted to, African Negroes calculate events as carefully as von Neuman and Morgenstern calculate structures requiring a peculiarly more complex mathematical system.
<p align=justify>
In the Sudan the game of <i>Bolotoudou</i>, analogous to tipcat, is very popular. It is played with twelve little sticks and twelve pebbles, which each player places in turn on thirty boxes arranged in five rows, six to each row. ...
<!--
Each time a player manages to place three of his pieces in a straight line, he takes one of his adversary's.
-->
Champions have their own equipment, which as part of the family inheritance is transmitted from father to son. The initial disposition of the pieces is of great importance.
<p align=justify>
[174]
<p align=justify>
The possible combinations are not infinite. Furthermore, an experienced player frequently stops the game whenever he recognizes that he is virtually beaten, before his defeat is apparent to the uninitiated. ...
<!--
He knows that his opponent must beat him, and the moves needed to bring this about.
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
No one takes much pleasure in profiting from the inexperience of a mediocre player. On the contrary, he is eager to teach him the winning maneuver,
</mark>
if he does not know it. For the game is above all a demonstration of the superiority and pleasure derived from testing one's powers. There must be a feeling of danger.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Mathematical theories that seek to determine with certainty, in all possible situations, which piece to move or which card to put down, are not promoting the spirit of the game but rather are destroying its reason for being.
</mark>
...
<!--
The game of "wolf," played on an ordinary checker board of sixty-four squares with one black piece and four white pieces, is a simple game with innumerable possible combinations. The object of the game is simple. The "sheep" (the four white pieces) must necessarily win. What pleasure can the player continue to feel, if he knows this? Such mathematical analyses, as destructive as they are perfect, also exist for other games, e.g. the sliding-part puzzles and the ring puzzles mentioned earlier.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is not probable, but it is possible and perhaps theoretically necessary that there should be such a thing as an absolute chess game, i.e. one in which from the first move to the last no stratagem should work, since the best possible move is automatically neutralized. It is not too farfetched to suppose that an
electronic computer, having exhausted all conceivable combinations, could construct this ideal game. However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
one would no longer be playing chess
</mark>
. The first move alone would determine the winner or perhaps the loser of the game.
<br><br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The mathematical analysis of games thus turns out to be a game in itself which has only an incidental relationship to the games analyzed.
</mark>
It would exist even if there were no games to analyze. It can and must develop independently, gratuitously inventing ever more complex situations and rules. It does not
<br><br>
[175]
<br><br>
have the least effect upon the nature of the game itself.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In effect, mathematical analysis either ends in certainty, and the game loses interest, or it establishes a coefficient of probability which merely leads to a more rational appreciation of the risks assumed or not assumed by the player, depending upon his prudence or temerity.
</mark>
<br><br><br>
Play is a total activity. It involves a totality of human behavior and interests. Various approaches—from psychology to mathematics and, in passing, history and sociology—by reason of their special biases have been unable to contribute anything too fruitful to the study of play. Whatever the theoretical or practical value of the results obtained by each of these perspectives, these results are still without true meaning or impact, unless they are interpreted within the context of the central problem posed by the indivisibility of the world of play. This is the primary basis for interest in games.
</blockquote>
<br><br>Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-56385166821570245702023-07-12T18:33:00.003-07:002023-07-12T18:55:57.934-07:00Caillois—MPG (vi)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
[99]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER VIII
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
Competition and Chance
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Wearing of mandis permia Dionysian societies to reincarnate (and feel imbued with) powers and spirits, special energies and gods. It covers a primitive type
of culture founded, as has been shown, on the powerful association of pantomime with ecstasy. Spread over the entire surface of the planet, it seems to be a false solution, obligatory and fascinating, prior to slow, painful, deliberate, and decisive social progress. The birth of civilization means the emergence
from this impasse.
<br><br><br>
However, a revolution of such magnitude is not accomplished in a day. In addition, while it always takes place in transitional eras that make cultures accessible to history, it is only the last phases that succeed in doing this. The older documents attesting to it can scarcely regard as significant the first obscure and perhaps fortuitous choices with immediate consequences, choices which nevertheless on occasion have committed cultures to a decisive adventure. However, the difference from
<br><br>
[100]
<br><br>
their initial primitive state, as reconstructed from their artifacts, is not the only convincing argument that their progress was only possible as a result of a long struggle against the prestige associated with simulation and vertigo.
<br><br>
No traces remain of their early virulence. But occasional clues to the struggle itself have survived. The intoxicating fumes of hemp were used by the Scythians and Iranians to stimulate ecstasy. It is also relevant that <i>Yâska</i> (19-20) affirms that Ahura Mazda is not drugged with hemp. Also, India provides
thousands of illustrations of the magic flight, as in the important passage from the <i>Mahabharata</i> (Vol. 160, 55 ft.), "We too can fly into the sky, and assume diverse magical forms."
<br><br>
Thus the genuine mystic ascent is clearly distinguished from the circuitous flights and simulated metamorphoses of ordinary magicians. It is well known how much asceticism and, above all, the formulae and metaphors of Yoga owe to shamanistic mythology. The analogy is so precise and literal that they are often believed to be directly related. As has also been stressed, Yoga is an internalization, a transposition to the spiritual plane of the powers of ecstasy. It is no longer a matter of the illusory conquest of space in the world, but rather a question of liberating oneself from the illusion that makes up the world. The role of striving is reversed. The goal is no longer to reach a state of panic and thus become easy prey to any type of catharsis, but on the contrary it is a system of exercises, a schooling in self-control.
<br><br>
In Tibet and China the experiences of the shamans have left many traces. The lamas have command of the air, rise to the sky, perform magic dances "adorning themselves with sevenvbone ornaments," and speak an unintelligible language rich in onomatopoeia. Taoists and alchemists, like Liu-An and Li Chao Kun, fly through the air. Others reach the gates of heaven, remove the comets, or climb the rainbow. However, this awesome heritage cannot prevent the development of critical reflection. Wang Ch'ung denounces the deceitful character of the words emitted by the dead from the mouths of those of the
-->
<p align=justify>
[101]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
living whom they have thrown into a trance, or produced by sorcerers
"while clutching their black robes." The <i>Kwoh Yû</i> relates how in antiquity King Chao (515-448B.C.) interrogated his minister as follows:
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
The writings of the Chou dynasty relate that Chung-Li was sent as a messenger to the remote regions of the sky and the earth. How was such a thing possible? Can men rise to the sky?
</font>
</blockquote>
His minister then instructed him as to the spiritual significance of the phenomenon. The just one, the one who is capable of concentrating, attains a superior kind of knowledge. He reaches the heights and descends to the nether regions so that he may distinguish between "the conduct to observe and the things to accomplish." As an official, the text goes on, he is then to watch over the order of precedence of the gods, victims, utensils, and liturgical costumes proper to the changing seasons.
<br><br>
The shaman, the man possessed, transformed by vertigo and ecstasy into an official, mandarin, or master of ceremonies, watchful over protocol and the correct allocation of honors and privileges, as an illustration of the revolution to be accomplished, is exaggerated almost to the point of caricature.
<br><br><br>
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
1. Transition
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<!--
If there are only isolated clues to indicate
-->
...how the techniques of vertigo evolved toward methodical control...
<!--
in India, Iran, and China, the documents that permit one to follow the different stages in this major metamorphosis are more numerous and explicit. Thus,
-->
...in the Indo-European world, the contrast between the two systems has long been evident in the two opposing forms of power clarified in the works of G. Dumézil. On the one side is the rational—a sovereign god presiding over contracts, exact, ponderous, meticulous, and conservative, a severe and mechanical assurance of norms, laws, and regularity, whose actions are bound to the necessarily predictable and conven-
<p align=justify>
[102]
<p align=justify>
tional forms of <i>agôn</i>,...
<!--
whether on the list in single combat and equal arms or in the praetorium interpreting the law impartially.
-->
On the other side is the charismatic—also a sovereign god, but inspired and terrible, unpredictable and paralyzing, esctatic, a powerful magician, master of illusion and metamorphosis,...
<!--
frequently patron and inspiration of a troop of masked men running wild.
-->
<p align=justify>
Between these two aspects of power, the rational and the charismatic, the competition seems to have been a sustained one and not everywhere subject to the same conditions. ...
<!--
In the Germanic world, for example, the god of vertigo is preferred. Odin, whose name Adam de Brême regards as equivalent to "furor," remains in mythology a perfect shaman. He has an eight-footed horse, properly regarded as a shaman's mount even as far away as Siberia. He can change into any animal, transport himself anywhere in an instant, and is kept informed by two supernatural crows, Huginn and Muninn. He hangs from a tree for nine days and nine nights in order to learn its secret constraining language—the runic. He is the founder of necromancy, interrogating the mummified head of Mimir. What is more, he practices (or is accused of practicing) the <i>seidhr</i>, which is purely shamanistic séance, complete with hallucinating music, ritual costume (blue cloak, bonnet of black lamb, skins of white cats, baton and bustle of chicken feathers), voyages to the other world, chorus of ghostly auxiliaries, trances, ecstasy, and prophecy. The berserkers that change themselves into fauns are also connected with masked societies.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Conversely, in Ancient Greece, if the point of departure is the same, nevertheless the rapidity and sharpness of the evolution, remarkably evident thanks to the relative abundance of documents, was so widely successful as to be deemed miraculous. It must be kept in mind that the word evolution acquires
acceptable meaning only if one is aware of the results obtained; i.e., ceremonies and temples, the desire for order, harmony, proportion, logic, and science spring from a legendary back-
-->
<p align=justify>
[103]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
ground haunted by magic bands of dancers and blacksmiths, Cyclopes and Curetes, Cabiri and Dactyls or Corybants, turbulent bands of terrifying, masked half-men and half-beasts, such as centaurs, whose equivalents in African initiatory societies have long been recognized. Spartan ephebi were given to lycanthropy just like the panther-men and tiger-men of equatorial Africa.
-->
<p align=justify>
During their cryptia, when the Spartan youth may have hunted Helots, it is certain that they led a life of isolation and ambush. They might not be seen or surprised. It was not a question of military preparation; such training was in no way compatible with the hoplites' way of fighting. The youth lives like a wolf and attacks like a wolf;...
<!--
he makes a solitary and sudden leap like a wild beast.
-->
He steals and kills with impunity, since his victims cannot catch him. The experience entails the dangers and advantages of an initiation. The neophyte wins the power and right to act like a wolf. He is eaten by a wolf and
reborn as a wolf. He risks being torn to pieces by wolves, and he in turn is now qualified to devour humans. ...
<!--
On the mountain of Lyceum in Arcadia, where Zeus is the patron of a band of lycanthropes, the one who eats the flesh of a child, which has been mixed with other meats, becomes a wolf, or the initiate swims across a pool and becomes a wolf for nine years in the wilderness he now inhabits. Lycurgus of Arcadia, whose name means "wolfmaker," pursues the young Dionysus. He threatens him with a mysterious contraption. Terrifying roars are heard, as well as the noise of a "subterranean drum, a thunder of pain and anguish" according to Strabo. It is not difficult to recognize the sound of the bull-roarer, used by masked dancers everywhere.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Reasons are not lacking for connecting the Spartan Lycurgus with the Arcadian Lycurgus.
-->
Between the sixth and the fourth centuries (B.C.) the supernatural apparition that provoked panic became the wise lawgiver. The sorcerer presiding over initiations became a teacher. In the same way, the wolf-men of Lacedaemonia are no longer fauns possessed by a god, living a wild
<p align=justify>
[104]
<p align=justify>
and subhuman life at the age of puberty. They are now a kind of political police sent on punitive expeditions in order to instill fear and obedience into the people.
<p align=justify>
The traditional ecstatic crisis is calmly adapted to purposes of repression and intimidation. Metamorphoses and trances are now mere memories. The cryptia no doubt remains secret. It is still one of the routine mechanisms of a militaristic republic whose rigid institutions ingeniously combine democracy and despotism.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
A minority of conquerors, who have already adopted another kind of law, continue to use the old formulae in ruling the subjugated population.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<br>
It is a striking and significant development, but it is a special case. At the same time, everywhere in Greece to some extent, orgiastic cults were still resorting to dancing, rhythm, and intoxication...
<!--
in order to stimulate ecstasy, oblivion, and divine possession.
-->
However, vertigo and simulation of this type were suppressed. They are no longer, and have not been for a long time, the central values of the city. They are a survival from remote antiquity.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Again (and again), calling this a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
survival
</mark>
confounds any appeal to a "human nature." The point is, <i>if certain</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
central values
</mark>
<i>didn't exist</i> (or "survive") <i>we'd have to invent them.</i>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This also implies that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the transition
</mark>
from barbarity to civilization is a one-way street, even where it proceeds in fits and starts. It might (just maybe) be worth seeing in it a matter of achievement that must be continually rewon; a toolkit which we can be sure contains what we need but doesn't come with any instruction manual, resulting in plenty of both <i>well-timed barbarity</i> and <i>untimely civilizing</i>.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
Descents to the nether regions and celestial expeditions in spirit, while the voyager's body remains inanimate on his bed, no longer take place. The soul of Aristeas of Proconnessus was seized by Apollo and accompanied him in the shape of a crow. Hermotimus of Clazomenae was able to shed his body for years at a time, in the course of which he sought knowledge of the future. Fasting and ecstasy had bestowed magic powers upon Epimenides of Crete in the divine cavern of Mount Ida. Abaris, prophet and healer, rode through the air mounted on a golden arrow. However, even the most persistent and the most elaborate of these tales already exhibit characteristics that are the converse of their primitive
significance. Orpheus does not guide his dead spouse back from the underworld where he went to seek her. One begins to understand that death is irrevocable and there is no magic that can vanquish it. In Plato, the ecstatic voyage of Er of Pamphylia is no longer a shamanistic odyssey, rich in dramatic crises, but
-->
<p align=justify>
[105]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
an allegory used by a philosopher to illustrate the laws of the cosmos and destiny.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
The disappearance of the mask, either as a means of transformation leading to ecstasy or as an instrument of political power, was a slow, irregular, and difficult process. The mask was the best symbol of superiority. In masked societies, the key question is whether one is masked and inspires fear or is not masked and is therefore afraid. In a more complex organization, some are afraid and others frighten, according to the degree of initiation. ...
<!--
To pass to a higher grade is to be instructed in the mystery of a more secret mask. One learns that the terrifying supernatural apparition is merely a man in disguise, and oneself dons a mask in order to terrify nonmembers or lower-grade
initiates.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
There is surely a problem in the decline of the mask.
-->
How and why were men led to renounce it? ...
<!--
The question does not seem to have bothered ethnographers. However, it is of extreme importance.
-->
I am advancing the following hypothesis,...
<!--
which is not narrow but on the contrary points to many, varied, and incompatible trends, corresponding to particular cultures and situations. However, it does suggest a common basis.
-->
The system of initiation and masks only functions when there is a precise and constant correlation between the revelation of the secret behind the mask and the right to use it in turn to reach a deifying trance and frighten novices. Knowledge and its application are closely connected.
<!--
Only one who knows the true nature of the mask and its wearer may assume that formidable appearance. Moreover,
-->
...it is not possible to come under its influence, or at least to the right degree,...
<!--
with the same emotion of sacred panic,
-->
if one knows that it is merely a disguise. Practically speaking, it is not possible to remain unaware of this for long. This gives rise to a permanent fissure in the system, which must be defended against the curiosity of the profane by a whole series of prohibitions and punishments,...
<!--
the latter being more real. In fact, only death is efficacious when a secret has
-->
<p align=justify>
[106]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
been exposed. It follows that despite the intimate experience provided by ecstasy and possession, it is nevertheless a fragil mechanism.
-->
It must constantly be protected from fortuitous discovery, indiscreet questions, and sacrilegious hypotheses or explanations. It is inevitable that gradually, without basically losing their sacred character, the fabrication and wearing of masks and disguises would no longer be protected by major interdictions. ...
<!--
Then, by imperceptible changes, they become liturgical ornaments and accessories to ceremonies, the dance, or the theater.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Perhaps the last attempt at political domination through masks was that of Hakim al-Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khurasan, who in the eighth century A.D., between the 160th and the 163rd years of the Hegira, kept the armies of the caliph in check. He wore a green veil on his face, or a golden mask
that he never removed, according to some writers. He claimed to be God and declared that he covered his face because any mortal seeing it would become blind. However, justly, his pretensions were strenuously disputed by his adversaries. The chroniclers—all official historians of the caliphs—write that he acted in this way because he was bald, had one eye, and was repulsively ugly. His disciples called upon him to provide the crucial test, asking to see his face. He showed it to them. Some were indeed burnt, and others were persuaded. Now the official history explains the miracle by revealing (or inventing) the stratagem. This is the story of the episode as found in one of
the earliest sources, the <i>Description topographique et historique
de Boukhara</i> by Abou-Bak Mohammad ibn Dja far Narshakhì, completed in 332nd year of the Hegira.
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
Fifty thousand of Mokanna's soldiers gathered at the palace gates, prostrated themselves, and asked to see him. But they received no response. They insisted and implored, saying that they would not budge until they saw the face of their God. Mokanna had a servant named Hadjeb. He said to him: "Go and say to my creations: Moses asked me to let him see my face, but I refused, for he would have been unable to withstand the sight of me, for if someone were to
</font>
</blockquote>
-->
<p align=justify>
[107]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
<blockquote>
<font size=2>
see me, he would die at once." However, the soldiers continued to implore him. Mokanna then said to them: "Come at such and such a day and I will show you my face."
<br><br>
Then to the women who were with him in the palace [one hundred of them, most of whom were the daughters of the peasants of Soghd, Kesh, and Nakhshad] he ordered that each should take a mirror and go to roof of the palace. [He taught them] . . . to hold their mirrors in such a way while standing in parallel rows, at the time when the rays of the sun shone [most intensely] . . . Then the men were gathered. When the sun was reflected from the mirrors, the entire area was suffused with light. He then said to his servant: "Say to my creatures: Here is your God before you. Look at him! Gaze upon him!" The men, seeing the whole place dazzling with light, were frightened. They fell prostrate.
</font>
</blockquote>
Like Empedocles, when Hakim was defeated he tried to disappear without leaving a trace, in order to create the belief that he had risen to heaven. He poisoned his hundred wives, decapitated his servant, and threw himself naked into a pit filled with quicklime (or into a cauldron of mercury, vat of vitriol, or oven of molten copper, tar, or sugar). Here, too, the chroniclers denounce his ruse. Although still efficacious (Hakim's followers believe in his divinity, not in his death, and Khurasan will not be at rest for a long time), the reign of the mask henceforth will seem like imposture and trickery. It is already defeated.
<br><br>
-->
<center>
**
</center>
<br>
<p align=justify>
The reign of <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i> as recognized, honored, and dominant cultural trends is indeed condemned as soon as the mind arrives at the concept of cosmos, i.e. a stable and orderly universe without miracles or transformations. ...
<!--
Such a universe seems the domain of regularity, necessity, and proportion—in a word, a world of number. Even in Greece the revolution in certain specific areas is already perceptible. Thus the first Pythagoreans still used concrete numbers. They conceived of them as having form and figure. Some numbers were triangular, some square, and others oblong, i.e. they could be represented by triangles, squares, or rectangles. They no doubt resembled the
-->
<p align=justify>
[108]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
ways in which the dots on dice and dominoes are arranged rather than symbols with no other significance beyond the numbers themselves. In addition, they also constituted sequences ruled by the three basic musical chords. And finally, they were endowed with distinct virtues corresponding to marriage (3),
justice (4), opportunity (7), or any other concept traditionally or arbitrarily attributed to them. Nevertheless, from this partly qualitative enumeration, drawing attention to the noteworthy properties of certain special progressions, there quickly emerged an abstract series of numbers which excluded arithmetical
philosophizing and required pure calculation, perhaps in this way becoming useful to science.
-->
<p align=justify>
Number, quantification, and the spirit of precision that they spread, even if incompatible with the spasms and paroxysms of ecstasy and disguise, compensate by allowing free rein to <i>agón</i> and <i>alea</i> as rules of games. At the same time as Greece was moving away from masked societies, replacing the frenzy of the ancient festivals with the serenity of processions and establishing a protocol at Delphi in place of prophetic delirium, it was institutionalizing regulated competition and even drawing lots. ...
<!--
In other words, in the founding of great games (Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian, and Nemean) and in the method of choosing city magistrates, agôn in association with alea takes the privileged place in society that <i>mimicry-ilinx</i> occupies in Dionysian societies.
-->
<p align=justify>
Stadium games devise and illustrate a rivalry that is limited, regulated, and specialized. Stripped of any personal feeling of hate or rancor, this new kind of emulation inaugurates a school of loyalty and generosity. At the same time, it spreads the custom of and respect for refereeing. Its civilizing role has often been stressed. In fact, "national" games are present in nearly all the great civilizations. ...
<!--
The Aztec games of pelota comprise ritualistic festivals in which the ruler and his court participate. In ancient China, archery contests tested the nobles not so much through the results but through their correctly shooting an arrow or consoling an unlucky adversary. In medieval
-->
<p align=justify>
[109]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Christendom, tournaments fulfilled the same function. The goal was not victory at any price, but prowess exhibited under conditions of equality, against a competitor whom one esteems and assists when in need, and using only legitimate means agreed to in advance at a fixed place and time.
-->
<p align=justify>
The evolution of administration also favors the extension of <i>agôn</i>. More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. The object is to assemble the ablest and most competent, in order to place them in a hierarchy (<i>cursus honorum</i>) or mandarinate (<i>chin</i>) in which advancement is defined by certain norms, fixed and controlled as much as possible by autonomous jurisdiction.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition
</mark>
, in which <i>agôn</i> is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. It penetrates institutions, timidly at first and only in minor posts. The rest long remain dependent upon the caprice of the ruler or the privileges conferred by birth or good fortune. It is no doubt theoretically the case that acceptance is regulated by competition. However, owing to the nature of the tests or the composition of examining boards, the highest grades in the army and important diplomatic or administrative posts often remain the monopoly of an ill-defined
caste jealous of its esprit de corps and protective of its solidarity. And yet, democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sometimes more nominal than real.
</mark>
<br><br>
In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
perhaps bizarre
</mark>
but
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impeccable and novel
</mark>
fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
by lot
</mark>
was an
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
absolutely equalitarian
</mark>
procedure. They viewed
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
elections
</mark>
as a kind of
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
subterfuge
</mark>
or
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
makeshift
</mark>
inspired by
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
aristocrats.
</mark>
Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ...
<!--
In addition, his argument conformed to conventional practice.
-->
In Athens, nearly all magistrates were drawn by lot, with the exception of generals and finance ministers, i.e. technicians. The members of the
<p align=justify>
[110]
<p align=justify>
Council were drawn by lot, after a qualifying examination, from candidates nominated by the demes. By way of compensation for this, the delegates to the Beotian League were elected. Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
very large
</mark>
or where
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
a large number
</mark>
of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
precaution
</mark>
against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In its beginnings, democracy wavers very instructively between <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>, the two opposing forms of justice.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<!--
This unexpected competition sheds light upon the profound relationship between the two opposing principles. It demonstrates that they are
-->
...contrasting but complementary solutions to a unique problem—that all start out equal. This may be accomplished by lot, provided they agree not to make any use of their natural capacities and provided they consent to a strictly passive attitude. Or, it may be achieved competitively if they are required to use their abilities to the utmost, thus providing indisputable proof of their excellence.
<p align=justify>
The competitive spirit has indeed become dominant. Good government consists of legally assuring each candidate of an identically equal chance to campaign for votes. One concept of democracy, perhaps more prevalent and plausible, tends to
consider the struggle between political parties as a kind of sports rivalry, exhibiting most of the characteristics of combat in the arena, lists or ring—i.e. limited stakes, respect for one's opponent and the referee's decision, loyalty, and genuine co-operation between the rivals, once a verdict has been reached.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In further enlarging the descriptive framework, it is seen that all of collective life, not merely its institutional aspect, from the moment when <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i> have been suppressed, rests on a precarious and infinitely variable equilibrium between <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>, or merit and chance.
-->
<p align=justify>
[111]
<p align=justify>
<br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
2. Merit and Chance
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
...
<!--
The Greeks, who as yet had no words to designate self or consciousness, concepts basic to the new order, in order to compensate continued to use a group of precise concepts to designate luck (<i>tyché</i>), the portion alloted to each man by destiny (<i>moira</i>), the opportune moment (<i>kariros</i>), i.e. the occasion inscribed in the immutable and irreversible order of things, and not repeatable because it is part of this order. Therefore birth is comparable to a ticket in a universal and compulsory lottery which assigns everyone certain gifts and privileges. Some are innate, others are social. There are more explicit conceptions of this idea, and in any event it is more prevalent than is realized. Among the Indians of Central America, who have
been converted to Christianity for ages, it is believed that each man is born with a personal <i>suerte</i>. This determines the individual's character, talents, weaknesses, social status, profession, and ultimately his luck, i.e. his future success or failure, his ability to recognize opportunity. No ambition is possible, nor is any competition imaginable. Each is born and becomes what fate has prescribed. <i>Agôn</i>—the desire to win—normally
counteracts such excessive fatalism.
-->
<p align=justify>
From a certain viewpoint, the infinite variety of political systems shows a preference for one or the other of the two opposing orders of superiority. ...
<!--
A choice must be made between inheritance, which is a lottery, and merit, which is competitive.
-->
Some try to perpetuate original inequalities as much as possible by means of caste or closed class systems. Others are devoted, on the contrary, to accelerating the circulation of elites,...
<!--
i.e. to reducing the impact of the original alea in order to increase the role of a more and more strictly regulated kind of rivalry.
-->
<p align=justify>
Neither of these political extremes is absolute. However oppressive the privileges associated with name, wealth, or some other advantage of birth, there always exists, however infini-
<p align=justify>
[112]
<p align=justify>
tesimally, a chance for audacity, ambition, and valor. Conversely, in more equalitarian societies where the hereditary in any form would not openly be admitted, it is hard to imagine that an accident of birth or the position of one's father would be without effect upon the son's career or would not automatically facilitate it. ...
<!--
It can scarcely be denied that there is an advantage in the simple fact that the young man grew up in a certain milieu in which he belonged, that he could count upon relatives and be protected, that he was familiar with its usages and prejudices, and that he received counsel and a valuable initiation from his father.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
In fact, in all societies to varying degree, as soon as they have become more complex, there is the opposition between wealth and poverty, glory and obscurity, power and slavery. ...
<!--
The equality of citizens is proclaimed, the question of juridical equality is at issue.
-->
Inheritance continues to weigh upon everybody like a mortgage that cannot be paid off—the laws of chance that reflect the continuity of nature and the inertia of society. The purpose of legislation is to counterbalance these effects. ...
<!--
Laws and constitutions therefore seek to establish a fair balance between capacities and performance so that the influence of class can be checked and ability can become truly dominant, as affirmed by qualified judges, just as in sports contests.
-->
However, it is obvious that the competitors are not equal in opportunity to make a good start.
<p align=justify>
<!--
Wealth, education, training, family background are all external and often decisive conditions which in practice may negate legal equality.
-->
Several generations are sometimes necessary for the underprivileged to catch up to the rich. The promised rules for true <i>agôn</i> are flouted. ...
<!--
The son of an agricultural worker from a poor and distant province, even if very able, finds it difficult to compete with the intellectually mediocre son of a high official in the capital.
-->
The origins of univerity youth have been studied statistically as a good means of measuring the fluidity of the class system. It is impressively
<p align=justify>
[113]
<p align=justify>
confirmed how even in socialist countries, despite indisputable progress, there is still social stratification.
<p align=justify>
To be sure, there are...
<!--
examinations, competitions, scholarships, and
--->
all kinds of encouragement for ability. However, this is mere homage or even palliation...
<!--
since most of the time these measures are lamentably insufficient—remedies, exceptions, and alibis rather than norms and general rules.
-->
Reality must be faced and the problem understood in societies that pretend to be equalitarian. Then it is clear that on the whole the only effective competition is between people of the same level, origin, and milieu. ...
<!--
The government does not seem to care. The son of a dignitary is always favored in whatever ways will make for access to high rewards. The problem is a difficult one in a democratic (or socialist or communist) society—i.e. how to properly compensate for the accident of birth.
-->
<p align=justify>
The principles of an equalitarian society certainly do not include the obtaining of rights and advantages through chance, for the latter are proper only to caste systems. However, even if many, rigorous mechanisms are designed to place everyone on his uniquely proper rung of the social ladder and to favor only true merit and proved ability, even here chance persists.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
All of this jibes well with Lasch's rejection of "social mobility," which is bound to strike many readers as a de facto endorsement of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
caste systems
</mark>
but at least has the strength of seeking to control only what we can control; e.g., in this case, something like "equality before the law" as against true social equality.
<br><br>
That is a very "conservative" position, I suppose. But it does seem equally transparent to me that we've never really achieved "equality before the law" in the USA, and the Conservative denial of this remains baffling.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<br>
First, it is found in the very <i>alea</i> of heredity, which distributes abilities and defects unequally. And it can only be chance that in fact indubitably favors the candidate who is asked only the question that he has carefully studied, while it compromises the success of the unlucky one who is questioned on just the very point that he has omitted. Thus, in the very heart of <i>agôn</i>, an aleatory element is suddenly introduced.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In fact, chance, opportunity, and aptitude to profit from them, play a constant and important role in society. The intrusions of physical and social advantages of heredity (honors, wealth, beauty, or refinement) upon triumphs of the will,
patience, competence, and work (the prerogatives of merit) are complex and innumerable. On the one hand, the gift of the gods or coincidence; on the other, the reward for effort, persistence, and ability.
-->
Similarly, in card games, winning sanctions a supe-
<p align=justify>
[114]
<p align=justify>
riority composed of the cards dealt the player plus his knowledge. <i>Alea</i> and <i>agôn</i> are therefore contradictory but complementary.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
They are opposed in permanent conflict, but united in a basic alliance.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<br>
Both as a matter of principle and institutionally, modern society tends to enlarge the domain of regulated competition, or merit, at the expense of birth and inheritance, or chance,...
<!--
an evolution which is reasonable, just, and favorable to the most capable. That is why political reformers ceaselessly try to devise more equitable types of competition and hasten their implementation.
-->
However, the results of their efforts are still meager and deceptive...
<!--
and also seem remote and improbable.
-->
<p align=justify>
Until something better turns up, everyone old enough to reflect upon the situation readily understands that it is too late...
<!--
and that the die is cast.
-->
Each man is conditioned by environment. ...
<!--
He may perhaps ameliorate conditions through merit, but he cannot transcend them. He is unable to radically change his station in life. From this arises the nostalgia for crossroads, for immediate solutions offering the possibility of unexpected success, even if only relative.
-->
Chance is courted because hard work and personal qualifications are powerless to bring such success about.
<p align=justify>
In addition
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
many people do not count on receiving anything much on personal merit alone
</mark>
. They are well aware that others are abler, more skillful, stronger, more intelligent, more hard-working, more ambitious, healthier, have a better memory, and are more pleasing or persuasive than they are. Also,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
being conscious of their inferiority, they do not trust in exact, impartial, and rational comparisons
</mark>
. They therefore turn to chance, seeking a discriminatory principle that might be kinder to them. Since they despair of winning in contests of <i>agôn</i>, they resort to lotteries or any games of chance, where even the least endowed, stupidest, and most handicapped, the unskilled and the indolent may be equal to the most resourceful and perspicacious as a result of the miraculous blindness of a new kind of justice.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Dare I say there is more than a hint of this to the Scrabble scene.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[115]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Under these conditions, <i>alea</i> again seems a necessary compensation for <i>agôn</i>
</mark>
, and its natural complement.
<!--
Those it dooms are entirely without hope in the future. It provides new experience. Recourse to chance helps people tolerate competition that is unfair or too rugged. At the same time,
-->
...it leaves hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still possible in the lowly stations in life, which are necessarily more numerous. That is why, to the degree that <i>alea</i> of birth loses its traditional supremacy and regulated competition becomes dominant, one sees a parallel development and proliferation of a thousand secondary mechanisms designed to bring sudden success out of turn to the rare winner.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Or maybe lotteries are just a really good <i>racket</i>?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
People do seem to be fascinated by the spectacle of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sudden success out of turn
</mark>
. That some projection is involved seems too obvious to dispute. Still, it can't be discounted that this is, for some perhaps, pure spectacle with little projection. This becomes more plausible as winning the lottery becomes more dangerous for the winner. But that aside, it seems to me always a bit tenuous to use mass appeal and mass consumption to validate an ascription of deep psychology, the same here as with art and entertainment proper.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Games of chance serve this purpose just as do numerous tests, games of chance in disguise, which are commonly publicized as competitions even though they are essentially gambles of a simpler complex character. ...
<!--
These tests or lotteries promise the lucky player a more modest fortune than he expects, but the very thought of it is sufficient to dazzle him. Anyone can win. This illusory expectation encourages the lowly to be more tolerant of a mediocre status that they have no practical means of ever improving. Extraordinary luck—a miracle—would be needed. It is the function of <i>alea</i> to always hold out hope of such a miracle. That is why games of chance continue to prosper. The state itself even profits from this. Despite the protests of moralists, it establishes official lotteries, thus benefiting from a source of revenue that for once is accepted enthusiastically by the public. Even if the state forgoes this expedient and leaves its exploitation to private enterprise, it still taxes it very heavily.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
To gamble is to renounce work, patience, and thrift in favor of a sudden lucky stroke of fortune which will bring one what a life of exhausting labor and privation has not, if chance is not trifled with and if one does not resort to speculation, which is partly related to chance. Moreover, in order to be attractive, at least the top prizes must be very high. Conversely, tickets must be as cheap as possible and easily divisible so that they can be more readily within the reach of the masses of im-
-->
<p align=justify>
[116]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
patient players. It follows that large winnings are rare, and therefore even more entrancing.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
To take a ready example, probably not the best, in the Sweepstakes of the <i>Grand Prix de Paris</i>, the first prize is 100 million francs, a sum that the vast majority of ticket buyers, who with difficulty earn only about 30,000 francs per month, must regard as simply fabulous. In fact, if the annual salary of the average worker is 400,000 francs, the first prize would require about 250 years of work. A ticket costing 18,500 francs, more than half a month's wages, is beyond the reach of the majority of wage earners. They must therefore be content to purchase "tenths," which for 2,000 francs cause them to contemplate a prize of 10 million, ordinarily requiring a quarter of a century of work. The attraction of such sudden wealth is inevitably intoxicating because it in fact connotes a radical change in status, the pure favor of destiny, and practically inconceivable through normal means.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The magic is efficacious. According to the most recent statistics,
-->
in 1955 the French spent 115 billions merely on state-controlled games of chance. Of this total, the gross receipts of the <i>Loterie Nationale</i> accounted for 46 billions, about 1,000 francs per capita. The same year, about 25 billions were distributed in prizes. ...
<!--
The top prizes, whose relative importance in relation to the total does not cease increasing, are deliberately calculated to stimulate the hope of sudden wealth in the public, who identify with the winners.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
I can cite as an example the official publicity to which the beneficiaries of unexpected wealth are more or less subjected, although anonymity is guaranteed if requested. But public opinion demands that the newspapers provide detailed information of their daily lives and their plans. They seem to be inviting the mass of their readers to try their luck again.
-->
<p align=justify>
Games of chance are not organized in all countries as gigantic lotteries on a national scale. When deprived of their official character and state support, they seem to diminish rapidly in importance. ...
<!--
The total value of the prizes falls as the
-->
<p align=justify>
[117]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
number of players is reduced. There is no longer an almost infinite disproportion between the amount wagered and the possible winnings. However, this does not result from the more modest volume of betting as the total wagered is diminished.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The contrary is true, because the drawing is no longer a solemn and relatively rare operation. The continuity of the games contributes generously to the volume of betting. When the casino opens, the croupiers, by direction, follow a fixed rhythm on the dozens of tables over which they preside, not for a moment stopping the roll of the roulette ball at the announcement of the outcome. In the gambling capitals of the world, at Deauville, Monte Carlo, Macao, or Las Vegas for example, even though the total money in continuous circulation may
reach a fabulous level, nevertheless the law of averages guarantees a constant percentage of profit on rapid and uninterrupted operations. This profit is sufficient for the city or state to prosper flamboyantly and scandalously, as reflected in brilliant festivals, rampant luxury, immorality, and all the vices
overtly designed as a contrast with ordinary life.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Such specialized metropolises attract in the main a transient clientele who have come to spend several days in the stimulating luxuries of pleasure and ease and then return to a more laborious and austere way of life. The cities that cater to the gambling urge are cloistered, are both refuge and paradise, and seem like huge, secret retreats or opium dens. They are tolerated to a degree and are profitable. A nomadic, curious, idle or maniacal population passes through them without settling there. Seven million tourists leave 60 million dollars annually at Las Vegas, a sum representing about 40% of the budget of the state of Nevada. The time passed there is merely a set of parentheses in their ordinary lives. The basic pattern of the culture has not
been appreciably affected.
-->
<p align=justify>
The existence of large cities whose reason for being and almost sole support lies in games of chance is no doubt an expression of the passion to gamble. Moreover, it is not in these abnormal cities that the instinct is strongest. ...
<!--
Elsewhere, pari-
-->
<p align=justify>
[118]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
mutuels permit one to play the horses without even going to the track. Sociologists have noted the tendency of factory workers to organize pools in which they bet relatively large sums, perhaps disproportionate to their salaries, on football games. This too is a culture trait.
-->
<p align=justify>
State lotteries, casinos, hippodromes, and pari-mutuels of all kinds are subsumed under pure <i>alea</i>, following the mathematical laws of probability.
<p align=justify>
In fact, when the general expenses of administration are deducted, the seemingly disproportionate profit is exactly proportionate to the amount risked by each player.
<h5>***over 100 prize***</h5>
A more remarkable modern innovation consists of what I shall arbitrarily call <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
disguised lotteries
</mark>
—i.e. those not requiring money to be risked and seeming to reward talent, learning, ingenuity, or any other type of merit, thus naturally escaping general notice or legal sanction. Some grand prizes of a literary character may truly bring fortune and glory to a writer, at least for several years. These contests stimulate thousands of others that are of little significance but which somehow trade upon the prestige of the more important competition. ...
<!--
A young girl, after having triumphed over many imposing rivals, is finally proclaimed Miss Universe. She becomes a movie star or marries a multimillionaire. Innumerable and unexpected Queens, Maids of Honor, Nurses, Sirens, etc. are similarly chosen, and in most cases enjoy a season of intoxicating but disputed notoriety and a dazzing but insecure season at one of the modish pleasure resorts.
-->
There are no limits to all this. Radiologists have even selected a girl (a Miss Lois Conway, 18 years of age) as Miss Skeleton, proved by X-rays to have the prettiest bony structure. ...
<!--
Sometimes preparation for the contest is necessary. On television, a small fortune is offered to anyone answering increasingly difficult questions on a particular subject. A special staff and impressive paraphernalia lend solemnity to this weekly program. An expert orator entertains the public. A very photogenic young girl serves as receptionist. Uniformed guards stand watch over the check exposed to public scrutiny. An electronic computer
-->
<p align=justify>
[119]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
assures an impartial choice of questions, and lastly, an isolation booth permits the candidates to meditate upon and prepare their fateful answers in solitude yet visible to all. In a modest way, they appear to be quaking before a stern tribunal. Hundreds of thousands of faraway viewers share in their anxiety and at the same time are flattered into feeling that they are judging the test.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
What is ostensibly involved is an examination in which the questions are designed to measure the extent of knowledge of the subject, i.e. <i>agôn</i>. In reality, a series of wagers have been arranged in which the chances of winning diminish as the value of the prize increases. The name frequently given to this game, "Double or Nothing," leaves no doubt of this. The rapidity of
the process is further proof. Fewer than ten questions suffice to render the risk extreme and the reward captivating. Those surviving the full course for a time become national heroes. In the United States, the press and public opinion successively became enamored of a shoemaker who specialized in Italian opera, a
Negro schoolgirl who was a champion speller, a policeman learned in Shakespeare, an old lady expert on the Bible, and a soldier who was a gourmet. Each week provides fresh examples.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The enthusiasm engendered by these successive wagers and the success of the event clearly indicate that the formula corresponds to a generally felt need. In any case, the exploitation is profitable just as are beauty contests—and doubtless for the same reasons. Sudden fortune, legitimate besides, because apparently due to merit, is compensation for the lack of opportunity to compete freely because of inequalities of class, status, or education. Daily competition is harsh and implacable as well as monotonous and exhausting. It provides no diversion and accumulates rancor. It abuses and discourages—for, practically speaking, it provides scarcely any hope of improving one's status
by means of one's earnings alone. Therefore everyone seeks to compensate. Each man dreams of an activity with opposing powers, both in excitement and a sudden means of genuinely
-->
<p align=justify>
[120]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
transcending his condition. To be sure, if he thinks about it, he will not be enticed. The consolation which such competition provides is a joke, but since publicity magnifies its appeal, the paucity of winners is less influential than the large mass of fans who follow their vicissitudes. They more or less identify themselves with the competitors. Through <i>identification</i>, they become drunk with the victor's triumph.
-->
<p>
<br><br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
3. Identification
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
At this point a new fact emerges, the significance and impact of which it is important to understand.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>Identification</i> is a degraded and diluted form of <i>mimicry</i>, the only one that can survive in a world dominated by the combination of merit and chance.
</mark>
The majority fail in competition or are ineligible to compete, having no chance to enter or succeed. Every soldier may carry a marshal's baton in his knapsack and be the most worthy to bear it, except that he may never become a marshal
commanding batallions of mere soldiers.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Chance, like merit, selects only a favored few.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The mere fact of this calls into question not merely the various conceits to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
merit</mark>ocracy
but in fact the very construction and meaningfulness of the concept of merit. <p style="margin-right: 30%">
With so much "merit" going unrewarded (often enough right alongside the crying need for it), we can see retrospectively that our working definition seldom enables us to identify noncontroversial instances of it; the only such instances we have, rather, are of those
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
favored few
</mark>
. Presumably there are others. Many others. But we cannot (necessarily) locate them.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Or maybe he just means that "merit" <i>is</i> unevenly distributed, period, no matter how we define it or how this might make us feel. It is possessed in degrees rather than absolutely, yet only a "favored few" are rewarded and subsequently become identifiable as meritorious. Ours is therefore a "winner take all" meritocracy, which mother wit and formal economic thought alike would tell us is not a meritocracy at all, since too many people (the majority) are not being rewarded <i>at all</i> for what merit they do possess.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The majority remain frustrated. Everyone wants to be first and in law and justice has the right to be. However, each one knows or suspects that he will not be, for the simple reason that by definition only one may be first. He may therefore choose to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
win indirectly
</mark>
, through
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
identification
</mark>
with someone else, which is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the only way in which all can triumph simultaneously
</mark>
without effort or chance of failure.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I suspect this has more to do with the appeal of sports than does any surface-level "content."
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
From this is derived the worship of stars and heroes, especially characteristic of modern society. This cult may in all justice be regarded as inevitable in a world in which sports and the movies are so dominant. Yet there is in this unanimous and spontaneous homage a less obvious but no less persuasive motive. The star and the hero present fascinating images of the only great success that can befall the more lowly and poor, if lucky. An unequaled devotion is given the meteoric apotheosis of someone who succeeds only through his personal resources—
<p align=justify>
[121]
<p align=justify>
muscles, voice, or charm,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the natural, inalienable weapons of the man without social influence.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The irony being that this wild popularity has, with time, undone the adequacy of mere
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
personal resources
</mark>
. Rather, spectator money has raised the stakes to where these talents also are intensely cultivated and "merit" reinscribes itself.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Consecration is rare and in part even unpredictable. It does not climax a conventional career. It is the reward of an extraordinary and mysterious convergence in which are compounded one's being magically gifted from infancy on, perseverance that no obstacle could discourage, and the ultimate test presented by the precarious but decisive opportunity met and seized without hesitation. The idol, for one, has visibly triumphed in an insidious, implacable, and confused competition, where success must come quickly—for these resources, which the most humble may have inherited and which may be the precarious lot of the poor, are time-bound; beauty fades, the voice cracks, muscles become flabby, and joints stiffen. Moreover, who does not at least vaguely dream of the fantastic possibility, which seems so near, of reaching the improbable heights of luxury and glory? Who does not desire to become a star or a champion? However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
how many among this multitude of dreamers are discouraged by the first obstacles?
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Good question. It is a question which Ericsson answers too breezily with the study of youth chess clubs. Therein he finds that initial discouragement is a common experience of many who later, through effort, become the best players. But it is unclear here and elsewhere whether he has really looked all that hard for those who gave up due to this initial discouragement. Really, how would he be able to find them? Is this not a classic Talebian problem of "silent evidence" going unaccounted for?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
How many come to grips with them? How many really think of some day braving them? That is why many prefer to triumph <i>vicariously</i>, through heroes of film or fiction, or better still, through the intervention of real and sympathetic characters like stars and champions. ...
<!--
They feel, despite everything, that they are represented by the manicurist elected Beauty Queen, by the salesgirl entrusted with the heroine's role in a super production, by the shopkeeper's daughter winning the <i>Tour de France</i>, by the gas station attendant who basks in the limelight as a champion toreador.
-->
<p align=justify>
There is doubtless no combination more inextricable than that of <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>. Merit such as each might claim is combined with the chance of an unprecedented fortune, in order to seemingly assure the novice a success so exceptional as to be miraculous. Here <i>mimicry</i> intervenes. Each one participates indirectly in an inordinate triumph which may happen to him, but
which deep inside him he knows can befall only one in millions.
<br><br>
[122]
<br><br>
In this way, everyone yields to the illusion and at the same time dispenses with the effort that would be necessary if he truly wished to try his luck and succeed.
<br><br>
This superficial and vague, but permanent, tenacious, and universal identification constitutes one of the essential compensatory mechanisms of democratic society. The majority have only this illusion to give them diversion, to distract them from a dull, monotonous, and tiresome existence. Such an
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
effort
</mark>
, or perhaps I ought to say such
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
alienation
</mark>
, even goes so far as to encompass personal gestures or to engender a kind of contagious hysteria suddenly possessing almost all the younger generation. This fascination is also encouraged by the press, movies, radio, and television.
<!--
Advertising and illustrated weeklies inevitably and seductively publish pictures of the hero or star far and wide. A continuous osmosis exists between these seasonal divinities and their multitude of admirers. The latter are kept informed with regard to the tastes, manias, superstitions, and even the most trivial details of the lives of the stars. They imitate them, copying their coiffures, adopting their manners, clothing, preferences, cosmetics, and diets. They live by them and in them, even to the extent that
-->
...some are inconsolable when the stars die and refuse to survive them. These impassioned devotions exclude neither collective frenzy nor suicide waves.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
It is obviously not the athlete's prowess nor the performer's art that provides an explanation of such fanaticism, but rather a kind of general need for identifying with the champion or the star.
</mark>
...
<!--
Such a habit quickly becomes second nature.
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
An observation that would be right at home in Rank or Becker.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<br>
The star symbolizes success personified, victory and recompense for the crushing and sordid inertia of daily life,...
<!--
a triumph over the obstacles that society sets in the way of valor. The inordinate glory of the idol is a continuous witness to the possibility of a triumph which has already been of some benefit to, and which to some extent is due to, those who worship the hero.
-->
This exaltation, which seemingly consecrates the hero, flouts the
<p align=justify>
[123]
<p align=justify>
established hierarchy in brilliantly and drastically obliterating the fate imposed upon all by the human condition. One also imagines such a career to be somewhat suspicious, impure, or irregular.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The residue of envy underlying admiration
</mark>
does not fail to see in it a triumph compounded of ambition, intrigue, impudence, and publicity.
<p align=justify>
Kings are exempt from such suspicion, but their status, far from contradicting social inequality, on the contrary provides the most striking illustration of it. For one sees the press and public excited over the persons of monarchs, court ceremony, love affairs of princesses, and abdication of rulers, no less than over film stars.
<p align=justify>
Hereditary majesty, its legitimacy guaranteed by generations of absolute power, evokes an image of a symmetrical grandeur which derives from the historic past a more stable type of prestige than that conferred by a sudden and transitory success.
<!--
To benefit from such decisive superiority, monarchs merely have to be born. Their merit is immaterial. They admittedly are uniquely privileged in that
-->
...no effort, desire, or choice is even required—merely the pure verdict of absolute <i>alea</i>. Identification with them is therefore minimal. ...
<!--
By definition, kings are part of a forbidden world into which admission is only by birth. They represent social inertia and order, together with the limits and obstacles that they place in the paths of both merit and justice, and not social mobility or chance. The legitimacy of princes seems like the supreme, if scandalous, incarnation of natural law. It literally crowns and destines for the throne a person distinguished by nothing but chance from those whom he is called upon to rule, by virtue of a blind decree of fate.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
Because of this,
-->
...the popular imagination needs to bring the one from whom it is separated by insurmountable barriers as close as possible to the common level. People desire that he be simple, sensitive,...
<!--
and above all unwed to the pomp and honors to which he is condemned. He is pitied, if he is in the least envious of others. It is evident that the -->
...simplest pleasures are forbidden to him, and it is stressed repeatedly that he is not free
<br><br>
[124]
<br><br>
to love, that he owes himself to the crown, etiquette, and affairs of state. ...
<!--
A bizarre mixture of envy and pity thus surrounds the royal personage, and even while people acclaim kings and queens, they seek to persuade themselves that they are no different from them and that the scepter entails boredom, sadness,
fatigue, and servitude, even more than it confers good fortune and power.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Queens and kings are depicted as avid for affection, sincerity, solitude, escape, and, above all, freedom. "I can't even buy a newspaper," said the Queen of England when she visited Paris in 1957. This is indeed a prototype of what is expected of sovereigns, and it seems to correspond to a basic popular need.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The press treats queens and princesses like stars of stage and screen, but stars in bondage to a unique, crushing, and fixed role that they can merely aspire to abandon. They are stars who have been trapped by the characters they play.
-->
<p align=justify>
Even an equalitarian society leaves the lowly with small hope of rising above their disappointing existence. ...
<!--
It condemns almost all of them to live out their lives within the very narrow range to which they were born. They are lulled by radiant visions which divert the ambition they have legitimately acquired in school and that life has shown to be chimerical.
-->
While the champion and the star illustrate the dazzling successes possible even to the most underprivileged, despotic court protocol is a reminder that the lives of monarchs are only happy to the degree that they retain something of the common touch, thus confirming that not too great an advantage accrues from even the most inordinate endowments of fortune.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
These beliefs are strangely contradictory. Deceitful as they are, they nevertheless have an unavoidable lure. They declare a confidence in the gifts of chance when they favor the humble, and they deny the advantages that seem to assure, from the cradle, a brilliant destiny to the sons of the powerful.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
...
<!--
Such prevalent attitudes are not odd. An explanation of their
magnitude and stability is needed. They are part of the per-
-->
<p align=justify>
[125]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
manent social structure.
-->
The new social <i>game</i>, as has been seen, is defined in terms of the debate between birth and merit,...
<!--
between victory through proven superiority and the triumph of the luckiest. Moreover,
-->
...while society rests upon universal equality and proclaims so, only the very few inherit or achieve a place at the top, and it is all too clear that no others can reach the top except through an inconceivable revolution.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
From such a stratified society arises the subterfuge of identification.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
What about the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
identification
</mark>
of the <i>un</i>ambitious with, say, Donald Duck? Could these identifications, which seem (motivatedly) to elide the achievement-based
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
new social game
</mark>
, could these therefore be determined by this "game" nonetheless?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
An elementary and benign imitation provides harmless compensation to the masses, who are resigned and have neither hope nor Opportunity of attaining the luxury and glory by which they are dazzled.
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<i>Mimicry</i> is diffused and corrupted. Deprived of the mask, it no longer leads to possession and hypnosis, merely to the vainest of dreams. ...
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These dreams originate in the magic of a darkened auditorium or a sunny stadium, when all eyes are fixed upon the gestures of a dazzling hero. They are endlessly reinforced by publicity, press, and radio. The dreams vicariously captivate many thousands who are influenced by their favorite idols from afar and who live in imagination the sumptuous and full life dramatically described to them daily.
-->
Although the mask is no longer worn, except on rare occasions, and has no utility, mimicry, infinitely diffused, serves as a support or a balance for the new norms governing society.
<p align=justify>
At the same time <i>vertigo</i>, which has been even more displaced, no longer exercises, except in the corrupt form of alcohol and drugs, a permanent and powerful attraction. Like the mask or travesty it is no longer, properly speaking, play, i.e. regulated, circumscribed activity separated from real life. These foregoing episodic roles certainly do not exhaust the virulence
of the forces of simulation and trance, which are now subdued. That is why they erupt in hypocritical and perverse form, in the midst of a world which inhibits and normally does not recognize them.
<p align=justify>
<br>
...
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It is time to conclude. The question was merely one of showing how the mainsprings of play complement each other. This
<p align=justify>
[126]
<p align=justify>
involves a dual analysis. On the one hand, vertigo and simulation, which together lead to the alienation of individuality, are dominant in a type of society in which neither competition nor chance is excluded. But competition has not been systematized in that society and has very little place in its institutions. Even when present, it is most often a mere test of strength or comparative prestige. In addition, this prestige is often magical in origin and nature, derived from trances and spasms and based upon masks and mimicry. As for chance, it is not an abstract expression of a statistical coefficient, but a sacred sign of the favor of the gods.
<p align=justify>
On the other hand, regulated competition and the verdict of chance, implying both exact calculation and speculation intended to assign risks and rewards equitably, constitute complementary principles in another type of society. They create law, i.e. a fixed, abstract, and coherent code, so profoundly modifying the social norms that the Roman adage <i>"Ubi societas, ibi ius"</i>, presupposing as it does an absolute correlation between society and law,
seems to affirm that society itself begins with this revolution. Ecstasy and pantomime are not unknown in such a universe, but when found there they are, so to speak, <i>déclassé</i>. In normal times they are absent except in meager, weak, or chastened forms, mostly harmless and vicarious. However, their magnetic power is still sufficient to suddenly precipitate a crowd into a
monstrous frenzy. History provides enough strange and terrible examples of this, from the Children's Crusade in the Middle Ages to the orchestrated vertigo of the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. There are the numerous epidemics of jumpers, dancers, epileptics, and flagellants, the Münster Anabaptists of the sixtenth century, the Ghost Dance religion of the Sioux at the end of the nineteenth century-as yet badly adapted to the new culture pattern—the
"revival" in Wales in 1904 and 1905, and many other sudden, irresistible, and at times devastating, contagions that contradict the norms of the civilization that support them. A recent example, typical but more localized, is
<br><br>
[127]
<br><br>
provided by the rioting of Stockholm adolescents on New Year's Eve, 1957, an incomprehensible explosion of a passion for silent and willful destruction.
<br><br><br>
These excesses or paroxysms could no longer be the rule, nor appear as the time or sign of fortune, as an expected and revered explosion. Possession and mimicry no longer lead to anything but an incomprehensible aberration, transitory and horrible like war, which seems the modern equivalent of primitive festivals. The madman is no longer regarded as the medium of a god by whom he is possessed. He is not viewed as a prophet or healer. By common agreement, authority is allied with calm and reason, not with frenzy. It was also necessary to correlate dementia and the festival—every Dionysian revelry,
whether born of the delirium of one possessed or the effervescence of a multitude. For this price the city could be born and grow, men could pass from the illusory, magical, sudden, total, and vain mastery of the universe to the slow but effective technical control of natural resources.
<br><br>
The problem is far from resolved. Still ignored is the fortunate series of decisive choices that enables certain rare cultures to slip through the narrowest crack, to win the most unlikely bet—choices that introduce into history, which at the same time sanctions it, an undirected aspiration; thanks to these fortunate choices the authority of the past ceases to paralyze the power to innovate and progress—heritage replaces obsession.
<br><br>
The group that can hold to such a wager escapes from the kind of time that lacks a usable past or a sense of the future—a time in which it can only wait for the cyclical return of the masked gods, imitated at fixed intervals in complete unconsciousness of self. Such a group engages in an audacious and
creative venture, which is linear rather than periodically returning to the same point—experimental, exploratory, endless; the very adventure of civilization.
-->
<p align=justify>
It would certainly be unreasonable to conclude, in the attempt to prove a definite hypothesis, that it was ever sufficient for a
<p align=justify>
[128]
<p align=justify>
group to challenge the ascendance of the <i>mimicry-ilinx</i> combination and substitute for it a universe in which merit and chance, <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>, would rule. As to this we can only speculate. But that this rupture accompanies the decisive revolution and is involved in correctly describing it, even where its effects are almost imperceptible, can hardly be denied;...
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indeed, this may be so obvious as not to require emphasis.
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</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<hr>
<h5>***lasch meritocracy***</h5>
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
<i>"The reign of </i>mimicry<i> and </i>ilinx<i> as recognized, honored, and dominant cultural trends is indeed condemned as soon as the mind arrives at the concept of cosmos, i.e. a stable and orderly universe without miracles or transformations."</i>
(p. 107)
<i>"More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. ... Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition, in which </i>agôn<i> is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. ... It is no doubt theoretically the case that acceptance is regulated by competition. However...,the highest grades in the army and important diplomatic or administrative posts often remain the monopoly of an ill-defined caste jealous of its esprit de corps and protective of its solidarity. And yet, democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is sometimes more nominal than real.
"In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in perhaps bizarre but impeccable and novel fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates by lot was an absolutely equalitarian procedure. They viewed elections as a kind of subterfuge or makeshift inspired by aristocrats. Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ... In Athens, nearly all magistrates were drawn by lot, with the exception of generals and finance ministers, i.e. technicians. The members of the</i>
[110]
<i>Council were drawn by lot, after a qualifying examination, from candidates nominated by the demes. By way of compensation for this, the delegates to the Beotian League were elected. Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was very large or where a large number of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a precaution against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace. In its beginnings, democracy wavers very instructively between <i>agôn</i> and </i>alea<i>, the two opposing forms of justice."</i>
(pp. 109-110)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-vi.html">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***lasch sport***</h5>
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
<i>"Number, quantification, and the spirit of precision that they spread, even if incompatible with the spasms and paroxysms of ecstasy and disguise, compensate by allowing free rein to </i>agón<i> and </i>alea<i> as rules of games. ...
"Stadium games devise and illustrate a rivalry that is limited, regulated, and specialized. Stripped of any personal feeling of hate or rancor, this new kind of emulation inaugurates a school of loyalty and generosity. At the same time, it spreads the custom of and respect for refereeing. Its civilizing role has often been stressed."</i>
(p. 108)
<i>"Chance is courted because hard work and personal qualifications are powerless to bring such success about.
"In addition many people do not count on receiving anything much on personal merit alone. ...being conscious of their inferiority, they do not trust in exact, impartial, and rational comparisons. They therefore turn to chance, seeking a discriminatory principle that might be kinder to them. ...</i>
[115]
<i>Under these conditions, </i>alea<i> again seems a necessary compensation for </i>agôn<i>, and its natural complement. ...it leaves hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still possible in the lowly stations in life, which are necessarily more numerous. That is why, to the degree that </i>alea<i> of birth loses its traditional supremacy and regulated competition becomes dominant, one sees a parallel development and proliferation of a thousand secondary mechanisms designed to bring sudden success out of turn to the rare winner.
(pp. 114-115)
section heading:
<i>3. Identification
"</i>Identification<i> is a degraded and diluted form of </i>mimicry<i>, the only one that can survive in a world dominated by the combination of merit and chance. ... Every soldier may carry a marshal's baton in his knapsack..., except that he may never become a marshal commanding batallions of mere soldiers. Chance, like merit, selects only a favored few.
"Everyone wants to be first and in law and justice has the right to be. However, each one knows or suspects that he will not be, for the simple reason that by definition only one may be first. He may therefore choose to win indirectly, through identification with someone else, which is the only way in which all can triumph simultaneously without effort or chance of failure."</i>
(p. 120)
I suspect this <i>"identification"</i> has much more to do with the appeal of sports than any of the other customary explanations.
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-vi.html">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***over a hundred prize***</h5>
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
<i>"More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. ... Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition, in which <i>agôn</i> is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. ...democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is sometimes more nominal than real.
"In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in perhaps bizarre but impeccable and novel fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates by lot was an absolutely equalitarian procedure. They viewed elections as a kind of subterfuge or makeshift inspired by aristocrats. Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ...
[110]
Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was very large or where a large number of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a precaution against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace."</i>
(pp. 109-110)
<i>"...what I shall arbitrarily call disguised lotteries—i.e. those not requiring money to be risked and seeming to reward talent, learning, ingenuity, or any other type of merit, thus naturally escaping general notice or legal sanction. Some grand prizes of a literary character may truly bring fortune and glory to a writer, at least for several years. These contests stimulate thousands of others that are of little significance but which somehow trade upon the prestige of the more important competition. ... There are no limits to all this. Radiologists have even selected a girl (a Miss Lois Conway, 18 years of age) as Miss Skeleton, proved by X-rays to have the prettiest bony structure."</i>
(p. 118)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-vi.html">more</a>)
(see also <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/science-funding-is-a-gamble-so-lets-give-out-money-by-lottery">this</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***if an ericsson+pool post goes up, attach this to it***</h5>
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
<i>"who does not at least vaguely dream of the fantastic possibility, which seems so near, of reaching the improbable heights of luxury and glory? Who does not desire to become a star or a champion? However, how many among this multitude of dreamers are discouraged by the first obstacles?"</i>
(p. 121)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-vi.html">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-64025471356664217422023-07-12T18:24:00.001-07:002023-07-12T18:32:08.652-07:00Caillois—MPG (v)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
[81]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER VII
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
Simulation and Vertigo
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
The persistence of games is remarkable.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia.
</mark>
The chief reason is that they are not important and possess
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the permanence of the insignficant
</mark>
. Herein lies a major mystery. For in order to benefit from this kind of fluid and yet obstinate continuity, they must be like the leaves on the trees which survive from one season to the next and remain identical. ...
<!--
Games must be ever similar to animal skins, the design on butterfly wings, and the spiral curves of shell fish which are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation.
-->
However, games do not have this hereditary sameness. They are innumerable and changeable. ...
<!--
They are clad in thousands of unequally distributed shapes, just as vegetable species are, but infinitely more adaptable, spreading and acclimating themselves with disconcerting ease.
-->
Their diffusion does not remain determinate for very long. It is noteworthy that playing with dolls and flying kites, decidely Occidental, were unknown in Europe until the
<p align=justify>
[82]
<p align=justify>
eighteenth century. Other games have been prevalent all over the world in one form or another since ancient times.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
They provide proof of the constancy of human nature on certain levels.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
If their origins could only occasionally be pinpointed, their unlimited diffusion could not be denied. They are all-persuasive. The impressive universality of rules, principles, apparatus, and capabilities must be admitted.
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<br><br><br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
1. The Interdependence of Games and Culture
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Stability and universality are complementary. They seem all the more significant since games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practiced.
</mark>
...
<!--
They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs. In antiquity, hopscotch was a labyrinth in which one pushed a stone—
i.e. the soul—toward the exit. With Christianity, the design became elongated and simplified, reproducing the layout of a basilica. The problem in moving the stone became to help the soul attain heaven, paradise, halo, or glory, coinciding with the high altar of the church, and schematically represented on the ground by a series of rectangles.
-->
In India, chess was played with four kings. The game spread to medieval Europe. Under the dual influence of the cults of the Virgin and of courtly love, one of the kings was changed to a queen or lady which became the most powerful piece, while the king was limited to the quasi-passive role of figurehead in the game. However, it is important that these vicissitudes have not affected the essential continuity...
<!--
of the games of hopscotch or chess.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
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One can even go further and posit in addition a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play. There is indeed an increasing affinity between their rules and the common characteristics and deficiencies of the members of the groups. These preferred and widely diffused games reflect, on the one hand, the tendencies, tastes, and ways of thought that are prevalent, while, at the same time, in educating and training
-->
<p align=justify>
[83]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
the players in these very virtues or eccentricities, they subtly confirm them in their habits and preferences. Thus, a game that is esteemed by a people may at the same time be utilized to define the society's moral or intellectual character, provide proof of its precise meaning, and contribute to its popular acceptance by accentuating the relevant qualities.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games. ...
<!--
They necessarily reflect its culture pattern and provide useful indications as to the preferences, weakness, and strength of a given society at a particular stage of its evolution. Perhaps for an infinite intelligence, for the demon imagined by Maxwell, Sparta's destiny could be read in the military rigor of the games in the palaestra, that of Athens in the aphorisms of the sophists, that of Rome in the combats of the gladiators, and the decadence of Byzantium in the conflicts in the hippodrome. Games lead to habits and create reflexes.
-->
They cause certain kinds of reactions to be anticipated, and as a consequence the opposite reactions come to be regarded as brutal, snide, subversive, or disloyal. The contrast with games preferred by neighboring peoples does not provide the surest method of determining the origins of psychological incompatibility, but it can provide impressive illustrations, after the fact.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Postmodernity presents a challenge to these speculations, if not merely in showing <i>intra</i>-cultural fragmentation to be possible. And if we're really banking on a transhistorical
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
human nature
</mark>
, then what this means is that fragmentation was <i>always</i> possible before, latently, but it wasn't realized. And so, paradoxically, the "human nature" line leads to the supreme culturalist/environmentalist conclusion: the seeming homogeneity of gaming within cultures and any
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
after the fact
</mark>
support this might furnish for various evaluations of those cultures, really this just suggests that the broader circumstances favored uniformity over plurality; and so in any more plural outcome the generalizations on which such "after the fact" thinking might be based are necessarily more tenuous.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
To take an example, it is not without significance that the Anglo-Saxon sport, par excellence, is golf, a game in which a player at any time has the opportunity to cheat at will, but in which the game loses all interest from that point on. It should not be surprising that this may be correlated with the attitude of the taxpayer to the treasury and the citizen to the state.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
In this game of cultural
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
correlat</mark>ion,
the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
par excellence
</mark>
is a massive tell. What is the basis for adducing golf as unusually representative? Popularity? Diffusion? A long and stable history? Or is it merely golf's fitness for making this type of comparison to a broader cultural trait which we have <i>already</i> decided, <i>without</i> any appeal whatsoever to games, is a significant cultural trait?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
No less instructive an illustration is provided by the Argentine card game of <i>truco</i> in which the whole emphasis is upon guile and even trickery, but trickery that is codified, regulated and obligatory. ...
<!--
In this game, related to poker and manilla, it is essential for each player to let his partner know the cards in his hand,
-->
<p align=justify>
[84]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
without his opponents learning them. The cards are symbolized by various facial expressions. Appropriate pouts, grimaces, and winks, always identical, correspond to different high cards. These signals, part of the rules of the game, must be meaningful to one's partner, without enlightening one's adversary. The good player rapidly and discreetly profits from the least inattention of his opponents. An imperceptible sign alerts his partner. Various
card combinations are named after flowers. Skill is required to communicate them to the partner's mind without pronouncing them, merely suggesting them in so farfetched a manner that only one's partner can understand the message. Such rare components in a game so prevalent as to be almost a national pastime may
excite, sustain, or reflect habits of mind that help give ordinary life, and possibly public affairs too, their basic character—the recourse to ingenious allusions, a sharpened sense of solidarity among colleagues, a tendency toward deception, half in jest and half serious, admitted and welcomed as such for purposes of revenge, and finally a fluency in which it is difficult to find the key word, so that a corresponding aptitude must be acquired.
-->
<p align=justify>
Together with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
music
</mark>
, calligraphy, and painting, the Chinese place the games of checkers and chess among
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the five arts that a scholar must practice
</mark>
. They feel that both these games train the mind to find pleasure in multiple responses, combinations, and surprises that continuously give rise to new situations. Aggressiveness is thus inhibited while the mind finds tranquility,
harmony, and joy in contemplating the possibilities. This is without doubt a civilizational trait.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Sobeit declared. But surely these Chinese and their
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
five arts
</mark>
produced at least one Marshall McLuhan.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
However, it is clear that such diagnoses are infinitely precarious. Those that seem most obvious must be qualified drastically because of other facts. It is also generally the case that the multiplicity and variety of games simultaneously in favor in a particular culture is very significant.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Yes. Anything else?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
And finally, games happen to provide a nonmaterial reward, the pleasant and imaginative result of the illicit tendency disapproved and condemned by law and
public opinion. By contrast to wire marionettes, fairylike and graceful, guignols usually reincarnate (as already observed by
<p align=justify>
[85]
<p align=justify>
Hirn) ugly and cynical types, inclined to be grotesque and immoral, if not even sacrilegious. The traditional story of Punch and Judy is an example. ...
<!--
Punch kills his wife and child, refuses alms to a beggar whom he gives a beating, commits all manner of of crimes, kills death and the devil, and for a finale, hangs the executioner who has come to punish him on his own gallows.
-->
It would surely be a mistake to view this systematic caricature as an ideal reflection of the British audience that applauds these exploits. It does not approve them at all, but its boisterous pleasure provides a catharsis.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
To acclaim the wicked and triumphant puppet is cheap compensation for the thousands of moral constraints and taboos imposed upon the audience in real life.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
And, it must be added, at that point we have pretty much closed the book on the study of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Play and Games
</mark>
and moved on to more properly <i>literary</i> territory.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Whether an expression or a contradiction of social values, games seem necessarily related to the patterns and functions of different cultures. The relationship is rough or exact, precise or diffuse, but nevertheless inevitable. It now seems proper to conceive of a broader, and seemingly more rash, but perhaps less aleatory enterprise than a mere search for random correlations.
-->
It may be presumed that the principles which regulate games and permit them to be classified must make their influence felt outside of the domain of play, defined as separate, regulated, and imaginary.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The taste for competition, the pursuit of chance, the pleasure of simulation, and the attraction of vertigo certainly seem to be the principal effects of games, but their influence infallibly penetrates all of social life.
-->
Just as games are universal, but are not played the same way or to the same extent everywhere—in one place baseball is played more and chess in another—
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The previous acknowledgment of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
multiplicity and variety
</mark>
is already a distant memory.
</p>
<blockquote>
it is appropriate to inquire whether the principles of play (<i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i>, <i>ilinx</i>), outside of games, are not also inequally diffused through different societies. ...
<!--
In this way, the alleged differences may result in important contrasts in the collective and institutional behavior of peoples.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
I do not mean to insinuate in any way that cultures are like games and therefore also governed by <i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i>, and
<i>ilinx</i>. On the contrary, I maintain that the domain of play after
-->
<p align=justify>
[86]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
all constitutes a kind of islet, artificially dedicated to calculated competition, limited risks, inconsequential make-believe, and meaningless panic. However I also suspect that the principles of play, persistent and widespread mainsprings of human activity, so much so that they seem constant and universal, must markedly influence different types of society. I even suspect that they may in their turn be so classified, inasmuch as social norms may almost exclusively favor one of these at the expense of another. Must anything further be added?
-->
The question is not one of discovering that every society has members who are ambitious, fatalistic, simulate others, or are enfrenzied, and that each society offers unequal chances of success or satisfaction to these types. This is already known. The question is to determine the role played by competition, chance, mimicry, or hysteria in various societies.
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It is obvious how extremely ambitious a project it is that aims at nothing less than trying to define basic social mechanisms and their most diffuse and vague premises. These basic aspects are essentially of so insidious a nature that to describe their influence would not add materially to the precise depiction of social structures. At best a new set of labels or general concepts is provided. In addition, if the adopted nomenclature is recognized as corresponding to major contrasts, it tends by that very fact to set up for the classifying of societies a dichotomy as radical—for example—as that which separates cryptogamous from phanerogamous plants and vertebrate from invertebrate animals.
-->
<p align=justify>
In societies conventionally called primitive as against those described as complex or advanced, there are obvious contrasts that in the latter are not exhausted by the evolution of science, technology, industry, the role of administration, jurisprudence, or archives, theoretical and applied mathematics, the myriad consequences of urbanization and imperialism, and many others with consequences no less formidable or revocable. It is plausible to believe that between these two kinds of society there is a fundamental antagonism of another order, which may be at the
<p align=justify>
[87]
<p align=justify>
root of all the others, recapitulating, supporting, and explaining them.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Again, the "paradox" alluded to above: by insisting upon a "human nature" underlying all of this, such drastic and persistent
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
antagonism</mark>s
among
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
societ</mark>ies
become more and not less difficult to account for.
<br><br>
My feeling is there must be <i>some</i> human nature, on one hand, and some margin for adapability on the other; the challenge is in locating the boundaries, not necessaily in saying whether each exists. And if we can't locate the boundaries, it's hard to say much of anything further. In this case, though, we <i>can</i> say that the author has talked a bit out of both sides of his mouth.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
I shall describe this antagonism in the following manner: Some primitive societies, which I prefer to call "Dionysian," be they Australian, American, or African, are societies ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i>. Conversely, the Incas, Assyrians, Chinese, or Romans are orderly societies with offices, careers, codes, and ready-reckoners, with fixed and hierarchical privileges in which <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>, i.e. merit and hereditary, seem to be the chief complementary elements of the
game of living. In contrast to the primitive societies, these are "rational." In the first type there are simulation and vertigo or pantomime and ecstasy which assure the intensity and, as a consequence, the cohesion of social life. In the second type, the social nexus consists of compromise, of an implied reckoning between hereditary, which is a kind of chance, and capacity, which presupposes evaluation and competition.
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
2. Mask and Trance
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<!--
One of the principal ethnographic mysteries is conceded to lie in
-->
...the general use of masks in primitive society. An extreme and even a religious importance is attached everywhere to these instruments for metamorphosis. They emerge in festivals—an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge. ...
<!--
Masks, always fabricated secretly and destroyed or hidden after use, transform the officiants into gods, spirits, animal ancestors, and all types of terrifying and creative supernatural powers. On the occasion of unrestrained excitement or riot, which is popular and valued for its excesses, the use of masks is supposed to reinvigorate, renew, and recharge both nature and society. -->
The eruption of phantoms and strange powers terrifies and captivates the individual. He temporarily reincarnates, mimics, and identifies with these fright-
<p align=justify>
[88]
<p align=justify>
ful powers and soon, maddened and delirious, really believes that he is the god as whom he disguised himself,...
<!--
cleverly or crudely, in the beginning.
-->
The situation has now become reversed. It is he who inspires fear through his possessing this terrible and inhuman power. It was sufficient for him merely to
put on the mask that he himself made,...
<!--
to don the costume that he sewed, in order to resemble the revered and feared being and to produce a weird drone with the aid of a secret weapon, the bull-roarer, of which he alone has known the existence, character, operation, and function, ever since his initiation. He only learns that it is inoffensive, familiar, and all-too-human when he has it in his hands and in his furor uses it to frighten others. After the delirium and frenzy have subsided, the performer lapses to a state of dullness and exhaustion that leaves him only a confused, blurred memory of what has transpired.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br><br>
...
<!--
The whole group is involved in these great seizures and sacred convulsions. At the time of the festival, dancing ritual and pantomime are only preliminary. This prelude incites an increasing excitement. Vertigo then takes the place of simulation. As the Cabala warns, one becomes a ghost in playing a ghost.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Under pain of death, children and women must not assist in the fabrication of masks, ritual disguises, and various devices whose purpose is to frighten. They do not know that it is only a masquerade or make-believe that their parents are simulating.
-->
<p align=justify>
They conform...
<!--
because they are required to by society and
-->
, as do the performers themselves, because they believe that the actors have become transformed, possessed, and prey to the powers animating them.
<!--
In order to yield themselves to spirits that exist only in their minds and to suddenly experience the brutal transport,
-->
...the performers must evoke and excite them, must push their <i>selves</i> to the final debacle that permits the rare intrusion. To this end they employ thousands of artifices, any one of which may be suspect—...
<!--
fasting, drugs, hypnosis, monotonous or strident music, clatter, paroxysms of noise and movement, intoxication, shouting, and spasms.
-->
<p align=justify>
[89]
<p align=justify>
The festival...
<!--
—the destruction of wealth accumulated over a long period, disorder transformed into order, all norms inverted by the contagious presence of masks
-->
is climaxed by shared vertigo. It seems to be the ultimate basis for a society not too stable in other respects. It reinforces a fragile coherence,...
<!--
dull and not too significant, which would be difficult to maintain without this periodic explosion which draws together and integrates persons absorbed at all other times in domestic preoccupations and exclusively private concerns. These -->
...daily preoccupations have hardly any repercussions upon a rudimentary association in which the division of labor is very slight, and as a consequence each family is expected to provide for its own subsistence. Masks are the true social bond.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
A novel thesis. It is not new to postindustrial culture that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the true social bond
</mark>
would be in play rather than work. Rather, all that is new is certain forms of play, and perhaps the fact that some of us work less and play more.
</p>
<p>
...
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[94]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
naked and performs wearing only a monkey skin smeared with filth. He hops about and simulates sexual intercourse. To free him from the clutches of the god, an onion or tomato must be placed in his mouth. Nana Ayesha Karama causes the evil eye and smallpox. Her impersonator wears red and white garb. Two handkerchiefs are tied together round her head. She claps her hands, runs hither and yon, sits on the ground, scratches herself, holds her head in her hands, cries if not given sugar, dances a kind of round, sneezes, and disappears.
<p align=justify>
In Africa as in the Antilles the audience assists and encourages the subject and passes him the traditional paraphernalia of the divinity he is impersonating, while the actor creates his role out of his knowledge of the characteristics and life of his subject and his recollections of the séances at which he has in the past assisted. His delirium hardly permits any inventiveness or initiative. He behaves as expected and as he knows he must behave. Alfred Métraux, analyzing the course and nature of the voodooistic fit, has demonstrated how the subject's conscious desire to undergo it, an appropriate technique for stimulating it, and a liturgical pattern in its unfolding are necessary. The role of suggestion and even simulation is certain. However, most of the time they themselves seem to be the results of the impatience of the one desiring to be possessed and therefore a means of hastening the onset of the seizure. Suggestion and simulation increase one's susceptibility and stimulate the trance. The loss of consciousness, exaltation, and oblivion that they cause are favorable to the true trance, i.e. possession by the god. The resemblance to children's mimicry is so obvious that the writer
does not hesitate to conclude (p. 33): "In observing certain cases of possession, one is tempted to compare them to a child who imagines he is an Indian, for example, or an animal, and who strengthens the illusion by means of a piece of clothing or some other object." The difference is that in this case mimicry is not a game. It ends in vertigo, becomes part of the religious order, and fulfills a social function.
-->
<p align=justify>
One keeps returning to the general problem posed by the
<p align=justify>
[95]
<p align=justify>
wearing of masks. It is also associated with the experiences of possession and of communion with ancestors, spirits, and gods. ...
<!--
The wearer is temporarily exalted and made to believe that he is undergoing some decisive transformation. In any case, the unleashing of instincts and of overwhelmingly fearful and invincible forces is encouraged.
-->
No doubt the wearer of the mask is not deceived at the beginning, but he rapidly yields to the intoxication that seizes him. ...
<!--
His mind enthralled, he becomes completely abandoned to the disorder excited in him by his own mimicry.
-->
Georges Buraud writes: "The individual no longer knows himself. A monstrous shriek rises out of his throat, a cry of beast or god, a superhuman noise, a pure emanation of the force of combat, the passion of procreation, the unlimited magic powers by which he believes himself to be, and is momentarily possessed." ...
<!--
And to evoke the ardent climax of the masking in the brief African dawn, there is the hypnotic beat of the tom-tom, then the mad leaping of ghosts with gigantic strides as, mounted on stilts, they race above the tall grass, in a terrifying uproar of strange noises—hisses, rattles, and the whirring of bull-roarers.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is not merely vertigo, born of blind, uninhibited, and purposeless sharing of cosmic powers or of a dazzling epiphany of bestial divinities soon to return to the shadow world. It is also a simple intoxication with the permeation of terror and anxiety.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Above all, these apparitions from the beyond are the forerunner of government.
</mark>
The mask has now become institutionalized. Among the Dogon, for example, a culture that continuously resorts to masks, it has been observed how all of the public life of the group is impregnated with them. It is at the initiation rites of the male societies with their special masks that the basis for collective life and the crude beginnings of political power may be found. The mask is an instrument of secret societies. While disguising the identity of their members, it serves to inspire terror in the laity.
<p align=justify>
Initiation, the passage rite of puberty, frequently consists of revealing the purely human nature of the mask wearers to the
<p align=justify>
[96]
<p align=justify>
novices. From this viewpoint, initiation is an atheistic, agnostic, or negative teaching. It exposes a deception and makes one a party to it. Until then, adolescents were terrorized by masked apparitions. ...
<!--
One of them pursued the novices with whips. Excited by the performer, they caught, mastered, and disarmed him, tore off his costume, and removed his mask, recognizing a tribal elder. Henceforth, they belong to the other camp. They inspire fear. Clad in white and masked in their turn, reincarnating the spirits of the dead, they frighten the uninitiated, maltreat and rob those whom they catch or deem to deserve such treatment. They often stay constituted as semisecret societies or even undergo a second initiation so that they may be granted membership. Like the first initiation, it is accompanied by physical abuse, painful ordeals, and sometimes even by real or feigned catalepsy that simulates death and resurrection. Also, just as at the first ceremony, the initiates learn that the supposed spirits are only men in disguise and that their cavernous voices come out of particularly powerful bull-roarers. And finally, just like the original initiation, it gives them the privilege of playing all kinds of tricks upon the uninitiated. Every secret society possesses its distinctive fetish and protective mask. Each member of an inferior fraternity believes that the guardian-mask of the superior society is a supernatural being, while knowing full well the nature of his own.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Among the Bechuana, a bond of this type is called <i>mopato</i>, or mysterious, after the name of the initiation hut. It refers to the turbulence of youth, liberated from popular beliefs and commonly shared fears.
-->
The threatening and brutal actions of the initiates serve to reinforce the superstitious terror of their victims. In this way, the vertiginous combination of simulation and trance is sometimes deliberately transformed into a mixture of deceit and intimidation.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
It is at this point that a particular kind of political power emerges.
</mark>
<br><br>
These associations have varied goals. As may be the case, they specialize in the celebration of a magic rite, dance, or mystery, but they are charged with the repression of adultery, larceny,
<br><br>
[97]
<br><br>
black magic, and poisoning. ...
<!--
In Sierra Leone, there is a warrior society, with local branches, which pronounces and executes judgments. It organizes punitive expeditions against rebellious villages. It intervenes to keep the peace and prevent feuds. Among the Bambara, the <i>komo</i>, "who knows all and punishes all," a kind of African equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan, is the cause of an incessant reign of terror.
-->
The masked bands thus
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
keep order
</mark>
in society in a way in which vertigo and simulation or their close derivatives, terrifying mimicry and superstitious fear, again emerge, not as fortuitous elements in primitive culture, but as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
truly basic factors
</mark>
. It should be understood that mask and panic are present in <i>association</i>, inextricably interwoven and occupying a central place,...
<!--
whether in the social paroxysms called festivals, in magico-religious practices, or in the as yet crude form of a political system, even though they do not fulfill a major function in these three domains simultaneously.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br><br>
...
<!--
May it be asserted that the transition to civilization as such implies the gradual elimination of the primacy of <i>ilinx</i> and <i>mimicry</i> in combination, and the substitution and predominance of the <i>agôn-alea</i> pairing of competition and chance?
-->
Whether it be cause or effect, each time that an advanced culture succeeds in emerging from the chaotic original, a palpable repression of the powers of vertigo and simulation is verified. They lose their traditional dominance, are pushed to the periphery of public life, reduced to roles that become more and more modern and intermittent, if not clandestine and guilty, or are relegated to the limited and regulated domain of games and fiction where they afford men the same eternal satisfactions, but in sublimated form,...
<!--
serving merely as an escape from boredom or work and entailing neither madness nor delirium.
-->
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<br><br>
<h5>***lasch sport***
<br>
[[combine with other lasch sport comments??]]</h5>
<i>"The persistence of games is remarkable. Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia.
The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignficant."</i>
(p. 81)
<i>"It is noteworthy that playing with dolls and flying kites, decidely Occidental, were unknown in Europe until the
[82]
eighteenth century. ... They </i>[games]<i> provide proof of the constancy of human nature on certain levels."</i>
(pp. 81-82)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-v.html">more</a>)
<hr>
<h5>***millett's "compendium" fallacy!***</h5>
<i>"it is not without significance that the Anglo-Saxon sport, par excellence, is golf, a game in which a player at any time has the opportunity to cheat at will, but in which the game loses all interest from that point on. It should not be surprising that this may be correlated with the attitude of the taxpayer to the treasury and the citizen to the state."</i>
(p. 83)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-v.html">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-77581250284277979432023-07-11T19:51:00.001-07:002023-07-11T19:58:29.733-07:00Caillois—MPG (iv)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<br><br>
[57]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER V
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
Toward a Sociology Derived
<br>
from Games
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
For a long time the study of games has been scarcely more than the history of games. ...
<!--
Attention has been focused upon the equipment used in games more than on their nature, characteristics, laws, instinctive basis, or the type of satisfaction that they provide. They have generally been regarded as simple and insignificant pastimes for children.
-->
There was no thought of attributing the slightest cultural value to them. ...
<!--
Researches undertaken on the origin of games and toys merely confirm this first impression that playthings are mere gadgets and games are diverting and unimportant activities better left to children when adults have found something better to do.
-->
Thus, weapons fallen into disuse become toys...
<!--
—bows, shields, pea-shooters, and slingshots. The cup-and-ball and top
-->
<i>[or]</i>
originally were magical devices. A number of other games are equally based upon lost beliefs or reproduce in a vacuum rites
<p align=justify>
[58]
<p align=justify>
that are no longer significant. ...
<!--
Roundelays and counting-out rhymes also seem to be ancient incantations now obsolete. "In play, all is lost," is the conclusion to which the reader of Hirm, Groos, Lady Gomme, Carrington Bolton, and so many others is led.
-->
<p align=justify>
Huizinga, however, in his key work <i>Homo Ludens</i>, published in 1938, defends the very opposite thesis, that culture is derived from play. ...
<!--
Play is simultaneously liberty and invention, fantasy and discipline. All important cultural manifestations are based upon it. It creates and sustains the spirit of inquiry, respect for rules, and detachment. In some respects the rules of law, prosody, counterpoint, perspective, stagecraft, liturgy, military tactics, and debate are rules of play. They constitute conventions that must be respected. Their subtle interrelationships are the basis for civilization. In concluding <i>Homo Ludens</i>, one asks oneself, "What are the social consequences of play?"
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
A truly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
opposite thesis
</mark>
would not merely invert the absolutism of the first but rather argue a more nuanced line.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
The two theses are almost entirely contradictory.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I would say instead that they are <i>complementary</i>.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The only purpose in presenting them is perhaps to choose between them or to better articulate them. It must be admitted that they are not easily reconciled.
-->
In one case games are systematically viewed as a kind of degradation of adult activities that are transformed into meaningless distractions when they are no longer taken seriously. In the other case, the spirit of play is the source of the fertile conventions that permit the evolution of culture.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This sounds very...complementary.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
It stimulates ingenuity, refinement, and invention. At the same time it teaches loyalty in the face of the adversary and illustrates competition in which rivalry does not survive the encounter. To the degree that he is influenced by play, man can check the monotony, determinism, and brutality of nature. He learns to construct order, conceive economy, and establish equality.
-->
<br>
<p align=justify>
I believe that it is possible to resolve the contradiction.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The spirit of play is essential to culture, but games and toys are historically the residues of culture.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Yes.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Misunderstood survivals of a past era or culture traits borrowed from a strange culture and deprived of their original meaning seem to function when re-
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[59]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
moved from the society where they were originally established.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
In other words, when they are <i>appropriated</i>.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Appropriation can be good. I would say it is essential, actually. Much "appropriated" culture not only
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
seem</mark>s
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
to function
</mark>
when detached from its
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
original meaning
</mark>
; it also fills new roles and meet new needs, some (not all) of which are as important (while probably also <i>differently</i> important) to the appropriator.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Of course the devil is in the details...
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
They are now merely tolerated, whereas in the earlier society they were an integral part of its basic institutions, secular or sacred.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
What could be so great about being
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
merely tolerated
</mark>
as opposed to being
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
an integral part
</mark>
? Doesn't everybody want and need to be a part of something?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Of course we do, but people are not games, nor are they symphonies, nor hair styles. The only commonality among such cultural productions is that they <i>can be</i> appropriated.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Not everything about a person can be appropriated. When <i>who you are</i> is your hair or your symphony, though, you could be in a tough spot, or you could be reveling in that imitation which is the sincerest form of flattery. The latter would be more generous towards all the other people who think they want to be that hair or that symphony too, though admittedly that is a pretty weird thing to want in the first place.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
At that time, to be sure, they were not games, in the sense that one speaks of children's games, but they already were part of the essence of play, as correctly defined by Huizinga. Their social function changed, not their nature. The transfer or degradation that they underwent stripped them of their political and religious significance. But
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
this decadence only reveals, when isolated, what is basically the structure of play
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
So, we can be thankful for the revelation. But it can come only at the cost of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
decadence
</mark>
?
<!--
So, more than one thing can be true:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The spirit of play is essential to culture
</mark>
, and also,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
games and toys are historically the residues of culture
</mark>
.
<br><br>
Also note the thesis that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Misunderstood survivals of a past era or culture traits borrowed from a strange culture and deprived of their original meaning seem to function when removed from the society where they were originally established
</mark>
. Perhaps this
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
borrowing
</mark>
really is the <i>beginning</i>, and not the tragic ending it is usually made out to be by the guardians of Cultural Context.
-->
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It is fitting to give examples.
-->
The first and no doubt the most remarkable example is the mask—a sacred object universally present, whose transformation into a plaything perhaps marks a prime mutation in the history of civilization. ...
<!--
This is very well confirmed in comparable cases.
-->
The greasy pole is related to myths of heavenly conquest, football to the conflict over the solar globe by two opposing phratries. ...
<i>[etc., etc.]</i>
<!--
String games have been used to inaugurate the changing seasons and the social groups corresponding to them. The kite, before becoming a toy in Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century, in the Far East symbolized the soul of its owner resting on the ground outside his body, but magically bound (in reality by the cord to which the kite is fastened) to the fragile paper framework at the mercy of the eddying currents of air. In Korea the kite served as a scapegoat to liberate a sinful community from evil. In China it was utilized to measure distance, to transmit messages like a crude telegraph, and finally to lead a rope across a stream and in this way allow a bridge of boats to be constructed. In New Guinea it was used in advance of launchings. Hopscotch indeed symbolized the labyrinth through which the initiate must first wander. In the game of tag, beneath the childish innocence and activity, is recognized the terrifying choice of a propitiatory victim. Chosen by decree of destiny, before being selected by the sonorous and hollow syllables of counting-out rhymes, the victim could (at least in theory) rid himself of his defilement by
-->
<p align=justify>
[60]
<p align=justify>
<!--
passing it through touch to someone whom he had overtaken in the race.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In Egypt of the Pharaohs, a checkerboard is frequently represented in the tombs. The five squares at the bottom and to the right are ornamented with beneficent hieroglyphics. Above the player are inscriptions referring to the sentences in judgment of the dead, over which Osiris rules. The deceased plays for his destiny in the other world and wins or loses eternal salvation. In Vedic India, the sacrificer sways on a swing in order to help the sun rise. The trajectory of the swing is supposed to bind heaven and earth. The swing is currently associated with ideas of rain, fecundity, and renewal of nature. In the spring, Kama, god of love, is swinging as is Krishna, patron of herds. The cosmic swing helps the universe of creatures and worlds eternally coming and going.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The games played periodically in Greece were accompanied by sacrifices and processions. Dedicated to a divinity, they themselves constituted an offering of effort, skill, or grace. These sports contests were above all a kind of cult, the liturgy of a pious ceremony.
-->
<p align=justify>
Games of chance have been associated with divination in the same way games of strength or skill or riddle contests had probative value in the enthronement rituals for an important responsibility or ministry. The real game is often sadly bereft of its sacred origins. ...
<!--
The Eskimos only play cup-and-ball at the time of the spring equinox. This is on condition that they do not go hunting the next day. This delay for purification would not be explicable if the game of cup-and-ball had not to begin with been something more than a mere distraction. In fact, it leads to all kinds of mnemonic recitations. In England there is a special time fixed for spinning tops, and it is proper to confiscate the top of anyone playing with it out of season. It is known that villages, parishes, and cities once had gigantic tops that special confraternities caused to spin during certain festivals. Here too, a children's game would seem to evolve out of a significant prehistory.
-->
<p align=justify>
[61]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Roundelays and pantomimes would seem to prolong or double forgotten liturgies, e.g. in France, <i>"La Tour prends garde,"</i> <i>"Le Pont du Nord,"</i>
or <i>"Les Chevaliers du Guet,"</i> and in Great Britain "Jenny Jones" or "Old Rogers."
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It should not be necessary to point out in the scripts of these pastimes references to marriage by capture, various taboos, funeral rituals, and many forgotten customs.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Finally,
-->
there is hardly a game which may not
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
appear
</mark>
to
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
specialized historians
</mark>
as the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
last stage in the
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
gradual decline
</mark>
of a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
solemn and decisive activity
</mark>
that used to be tied to the prosperity or destiny of individuals or communities. I ask myself nevertheless whether such a doctrine, which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
persists
</mark>
in regarding every game as the
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
ultimate and humiliating metamorphosis
</mark>
of a serious activity, is not
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
fundamentally erroneous
</mark>, to wit,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a pure and simple
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
optical illusion
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
which
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
does not
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
resolve the problem.
</mark>
<br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It is indeed true that the bow, the slingshot, and the peashooter have survived as toys where they have replaced the more lethal weapons. But children play just as well with water pistols, cap pistols, or air rifles. They also play with miniature tanks, submarines, and airplanes which drop sham atomic
bombs. There is no new weapon that may not momentarily be introduced as a toy. Conversely,
-->
we are not at all certain that prehistoric children might not have been playing with bows, slingshots, and pea-shooters "for fun" at the same time that fathers used them "for real,"...
<!--
to use a very revealing expression from children's slang.
It is doubtful whether the automobile could have been invented so quickly if it were intended merely as a plaything. The game of Monopoly does not follow but rather reproduces the functions of Capitalism.
-->
<p align=justify>
This observation is no less valid for the sacred than for the profane. Kachinas are semidivinities that are the principal object of piety among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. This does not prevent the same adults, who revere and reincarnate them in the course of masked dances, from making dolls resembling
them for the amusement of their children. ...
<!--
Similarly, in Catholic
-->
<p align=justify>
[62]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
countries children currently play Mass, confirmation, marriage, and burial. Parents allow this, at least as long as the imitation remains respectful. In North Africa, analogously, children fashion masks and bull-roarers and for the same reasons are punished if the imitation goes too far and takes on a character too much like parody or sacrilege.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In sum, religious instruments, symbols, and rituals, just like military actions, are currently imitated by children. They find pleasure in behaving like adults, in momentarily making believe that they are grown up. That is why every ceremony, or more generally, every regulated activity, provided it be impressive or solemn and above all if a special costume be required, normally
serves to support a game which reproduces it in a vacuum. From this derives the success of toy weapons and contrivances that, thanks to appropriate parts and the elements of rudimentary travesty, enable the child to change into an army officer, policeman, jockey, aviator, sailor, cowboy, bus driver, or whatever remarkable character has come to his attention. An example is playing with dolls, which everywhere allows a little girl to imitate her mother or herself be a mother.
-->
<p align=justify>
There are grounds for suspecting that children's games are not a degradation of serious activities, but rather that two different levels are simultaneously involved. ...
<!--
In India, the child is playing on a swing at the very moment that the officiant is piously swinging Kama or Krishna in the liturgical swing sumptuously ornamented with precious stones and garlands.
-->
Today children play soldiers without armies' having disappeared.
...
<!--
And is it conceivable that doll play can ever disappear?
-->
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
To pass to adult activities, tournaments are games, wars are not.
<!--
In various ages few or many are killed in wars. To be sure,
-->
...one can be killed in a tournament, but only accidentally,...
<!--
just as in an auto race, boxing match, or fencing bout, because the tournament is more regulated, more separated from real life, and more circumscribed than war. In addition, it is naturally of no consequence outside the lists. It is a pure occasion for feats of
-->
<p align=justify>
[63]
<p align=justify>
<!--
prowess that are forgotten after the next exploit, in the same way as a new record erases a prior one. Again,
-->
...roulette is a game, but playing the market is not, even though the risk is no less. The difference is that in the former case it is forbidden to influence the outcome, whereas in the latter there is no limit on manipulation except the fear of scandal or prison.
<p align=justify>
Through this approach, it is seen that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
play is not at all a meaningless residue of a routine adult occupation,
</mark>
although it eventually perpetuates a counterfeit of adult activity after the latter has become obsolete. Above all,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
play is a parallel, independent activity, opposed to the acts and decisions of ordinary life by special characteristics appropriate to play
</mark>
. These I have tried to define and analyze at the outset.
<p align=justify>
<!--
Thus on the one hand children's games consist of imitating adults, just as the goal of their education is to prepare them in their turn as adults to assume real responsibilities that are no longer imaginary, that can no longer be abolished by merely saying, "I am not playing any more." The true problem starts here. For
-->
...it must not be forgotten that adults themselves continue to
play complicated, varied, and sometimes dangerous games, which are still viewed as games. Although fate and life may involve one in comparable activities, nevertheless play differs from these even when the player takes life less seriously than the game to which he is addicted. For the game remains separate, closed off, and, in principle, without important repercussions upon the stability and continuity of collective and institutional existence.
<p align=justify>
The many writers who persist in viewing games, especially children's games, as pleasant and insignificant activities, with little meaning or influence, have not sufficiently observed that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
play and ordinary life are constantly and universally antagonistic to each other
</mark>
. Such an error of perspective does have a moral. It surely shows that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the history of games or their evolution through the ages
</mark>
—the destiny of a liturgy that ends in a roundelay, a magic instrument or object of worship that becomes a toy—
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
is as remote from revealing their nature as are the scholars who have discovered these enduring and hazardous connections.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[64]
<p align=justify>
<!--
To compensate, as a kind of ricochet, they establish that play is correlated with culture, the most remarkable and complex manifestations of which are closely allied to the structure of games, or else the structure of games is diffused to reality and institutionalized in legislation, becoming imperious, constraining, irreplaceable, preferred—in a word, rules of the social game, norms of a game which is more than a game.
-->
<p align=justify>
In the end,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the question of knowing which preceded the other, play or the serious, is a vain one
</mark>
. To explain games as derived from laws, customs, and liturgies, or in reverse to explain jurisprudence, liturgy, and the rules for strategy, syllogisms, or
esthetics as a derivation of play, are complementary, equally fruitful operations
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
provided they are not regarded as mutually exclusive
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This point deserves emphasis. Still, it is secondary.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
What is primary? The
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expla</mark>nation
<i>du jour</i> cannot be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
fruitful
</mark>
if it is not true. It cannot be, as the author himself puts it above,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a pure and simple optical illusion
</mark>.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This challenge remains even for bidirectional, dynamic theories of play. Unless of course "truth content" or "explanatory power" is incidental to the purported need for an explanation in the first place, as it occasionally seems to be.
</p>
<blockquote>
The structures of play and reality are often identical, but the respective activities that they subsume are not reducible to each other in time or place. <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
They always take place in domains that are incompatible.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<!--
Moreover,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
what is expressed in play is no different from what is expressed in culture
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
?!
<blockquote>
The results coincide. In time, to be sure,
-->
...when a culture evolves, what had been an institution may become degraded. A once-essential contract becomes a purely formal convention to be respected or neglected at will, because abiding by it is now an extra responsibility, a luxurious and charming survival, without repercussions upon the actual functoning of society. Gradually this reverence deteriorates to the level of simply a rule of the game. ...
<!--
For example, advantages or responsibilities formerly vested in people by the accident of birth must now be achieved by merit, competition, or examination. In other words, the principles ruling various types of games—chance or skill, luck or proven superiority—are reflected to the same extent outside the closed universe of play.
-->
However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it must be remembered that the latter is ruled absolutely, without resistance, and like an imaginary world without matter or substance. In the confused, inextricable universe of real, human relationships, on the other hand, the action of given principles is never isolated, sovereign, or limited in advance. </mark>
It
<p align=justify>
[65]
<p align=justify>
entails inevitable consequences and possesses a natural propensity for good or evil.
<p align=justify>
In both cases, moreover, the same qualities can be identified:
<p align=justify>
<i>
The need to prove one's superiority
<br>
The desire to challenge, make a record, or merely overcome
<br>
an obstacle
<br>
The hope for and the pursuit of the favor of destiny
<br>
Pleasure in secrecy, make-believe, or disguise
<br>
Fear or inspiring of fear
<br>
The search for repetition and symmetry, or in contrast, the joy
<br>
of improvising, inventing, or infinitely varying solutions
<br>
Solving a mystery or riddle
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The satisfaction procured from all arts involving contrivance
</mark>
<br>
The desire to test one's strength, skill, speed, endurance, equi-
<br>
librium, or ingenuity
<br>
Conformity to rules and laws, the duty to respect them, and
<br>
the temptation to circumvent them
<br>
And lastly, the intoxication, longing for ecstasy, and desire for
<br>
voluptuous panic
</i>
<p align=justify>
These attitudes and impulses, often incompatible with each other, are found in the unprotected realm of social life, where acts normally have consequences, no less than in the marginal and abstract world of play.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
But they are not equally necessary, do not play the same role, and do not have the same influence.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In addition, it is impossible to keep them in proper balance. They largely exclude one another. Where the ones are honored, the others are of necessity decried.
</mark>
Depending upon circumstances, one obeys the law or heeds the voice of unreason, relies on reason or inspiration, esteems violence or diplomacy, prefers merit or experience and wisdom or some unverifiable (hence indisputable) knowledge supposed to come from the gods.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
An implicit, inexact, and incomplete division is thus made in each culture between values that are regarded as socially efficacious and all others. The latter then spread into secondary domains
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[66]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
which are abandoned to them, where play occupies an important place.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Here is a more nuanced version of the theory of "compensation."
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
It is also possible that the variability of cultures, on the basis of which each has its culture pattern and characteristic traits, can be correlated with certain games that are prevalent even though not popularly regarded as beneficial.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
It is obvious that
-->
...trying to define a culture by deriving it from games alone would be a rash and probably fallacious undertaking. In fact, every culture has and plays a large number of games of different kinds.
<!--
Above all, it is not possible to determine, without prior analysis, which are in accordance with, confirm, or reinforce established values, and conversely, which contradict and flout them, thus representing compensations or safety valves for a given society. To take one example,
-->
...it is clear that in Ancient Greece, the stadium games illustrate the ideal of the city and contribute to its fulfillment, while in a number of modern states national lotteries or parimutuels go against the professed ideal. Nevertheless they play a significant, perhaps indispensable, role to the precise degree that they offer an aleatory counterpart for the recompense that—in principle—work and merit alone can provide.
<p align=justify>
In all ways, because play occupies a unique domain the content of which is variable and sometimes even interchangeable with that of modern life, it is important first to determine as precisely as possible the special characteristics of this pursuit, which is regarded as proper for children, but which, when transformed, continues to seduce adults. This has been my first task.
<p align=justify>
At the same time, I must affirm that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
this supposed relaxation, at the moment that the adult submits to it, does not absorb him any less than his professional activity
</mark>
. It sometimes makes him exert even greater energy, skill, intelligence, or attention. This
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
freedom and intensity
</mark>
, the fact that the behavior that is so exalting develops in a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
separate, ideal
</mark>
world, sheltered from any fatal consequence, explains in my view the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cultural fertility
</mark>
of games and makes it understandable how the choice to which they attest itself reveals the character, pattern, and values of every society.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Well, sure. But already we're back to <i>reading</i> play for answers to questions which it answers multiply and ambiguously. The lottery example is well-chosen. To read this instance of play "correctly," we need to already know a good chunk of the answer to our question.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
It must be said too/again that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
compensation
</mark>
seems like an overreach: it could be something more like "balance" or "equilibrium," which is concurrent/simultaneous, rather than mere "compensation" <i>after the fact</i> and in isolation. We are driven to the notion of "compensation," I would guess, only because the things we do for work nowadays have become so miserable, or are thought to have become so.
Indeed, and especially if
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
culture
</mark>
is defined as: all things beyond the barest necessity.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[67]
<p align=justify>
Inasmuch as I am also convinced that there exist precise interrelationships of compensation or connivance in games, customs, and institutions, it does not seem to me unreasonable to find out whether the very destiny of cultures, their chance to flourish or stagnate, is not equally determined by their preference for one or another of the basic categories into which I have tried to divide
games, categories that are not equally creative. In other words, I have not only undertaken a sociology of games, I have the idea of laying the foundations for a sociology derived from games.
<br><br><br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[71]
<br><br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER VI
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
An Expanded Theory
<br>
of Games
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
The basic attitudes governing play—competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo—are not always encountered in isolation. In many situations it is possible to observe that they are apt to unite their attractions. ...
<!--
Numerous games are even based on their capacity to associate. Moreover, such clear-cut principles are not likely to blend indistinctly. To take them only in pairs, the four fundamental attitudes in theory can be coupled in six and only six ways. Each in turn is joined to one of the three others:
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
<p style="margin-left: 5%">
Competition—chance (<i>agôn—alea</i>)
<br>
Competition—simulation (<i>agôn—mimicry</i>)
<br>
Competition—vertigo (<i>agôn—ilinx</i>)
<br>
Chance—simulation (<i>alea—mimicry</i>)
<br>
Chance—vertigo (<i>alea—ilinx</i>)
<br>
Simulation—vertigo (<i>mimicry—ilinx</i>)
</p>
<br>
-->
<p align=justify>
[72]
<p align=justify>
<!--
To be sure, tripartite combinations can be visualized, but it is obvious that they would almost always be rare juxtapositions with no influence upon the character of the games in which they appeared. Thus
-->
...a horse race, typical <i>agôn</i> for the jockeys, is at the same time a spectacle which, as such, stimulates <i>mimicry</i> and is also a pretext for betting, through which the competition is a basis of <i>alea</i>. Moreover,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the three domains stay relatively autonomous. The principle of the race is not modified, by one's betting on the horses.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This is ideally. And even ideally it is a questionable assertion, since
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
autonomy
</mark>
implies a certain <i>equity</i> which is not usually in evidence.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I assume it can safely be said of some such competitions that they are staged only so that spectators can bet on them, not the other way around. (Or if it is not true yet, it will be soon.) The competition may still be <i>real</i>, but it is hard to imagine total "autonomy" here; or at least it is hard-er if we are biased against the idea that the betting and not the competition is driving the enterprise. But this is a bias and not an analysis; and indeed, betting often has <i>not</i> enjoyed anything like autonomy. The example is in fact quite poorly chosen this time, for at present scale it takes great precautions to prevent "corruption" between these two areas. They <i>could</i> remain autonomous, but this is highly unlikely.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
If this objection at the level of mass spectacle does not apply to most street-level activity, then that fact itself suggests that scale mediates autonomy; specifically, that by the time a competitive spectacle <i>qua</i> spectacle truly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
stimulates <i>mimcry</i>
</mark>
, "autonomy" is endangered. Seeing-and-being-seen is definitionally <i>not</i> autonomous.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
There is no association, but merely a meeting which, additionally, is in no way due to chance, and is explained by the very nature of the principles of play.
-->
<p align=justify>
The principles in question do not blend, even in pairs, with equal facility. ...
<!--
Their substance gives the six theoretically possible combinations levels of probability and efficacy that are very different. In certain cases their nature is such that their blending is inconceivable to begin with or even is excluded from the universe of play. Certain other combinations, which are not ruled out by the nature of things, remain purely accidental. They have no corresponding drives. Lastly, it happens that the major drives may inherently continue to oppose various kinds of games. In sum, a basic collusion is revealed.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
That is why, out of the six possible conjunctions between the principles of play, two upon examination seem unnatural, two others are merely viable, while the last two are basically compatible. It is important to pursue this analysis closely.
-->
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
<center>
<i>
<font size=4>
1. Forbidden Relationships
</font>
</i>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
In the first place, it is clear that vertigo cannot be associated with regulated rivalry, which immediately dilutes it. ...
<!--
The paralysis it provokes, like the blind fury it causes in other cases, is a strict negation of controlled effort. It destroys the conditions that define <i>agôn</i>, i.e. the efficacious resort to skill, power, and calculation, and self-control; respect for rules; the desire to test oneself under conditions of equality; prior submission to the decision
-->
<p align=justify>
[73]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
of a referee; an obligation, agreed to in advance, to circumscribe the conflict within set limits, etc. Nothing is left.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Rules and vertigo are decidedly incompatible.
-->
Simulation and chance are no more susceptible to mixing. In fact, any ruse makes the turn of the wheel purposeless. It makes no sense to try to deceive chance. The player asks for a decision that assures him the unconditional favor of destiny. ...
<!--
At the moment of entreaty, he would not wish to appear in the guise of a stranger, nor would he believe or pretend that he was anyone other than himself. Besides, no simulation can deceive destiny, by definition. <i>Alea</i> presupposes full and total abandon to the whims of chance, submission to which is incompatible with disguise or subterfuge. Otherwise, one enters the domain of magic, the object of which is to coerce destiny. Just as the principle of <i>agôn</i> is abruptly destroyed by vertigo, <i>alea</i> is similarly destroyed and there is no longer any game, properly speaking.
-->
<br><br>
<p align=justify>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
2. Contingent Relationships
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
In contrast, <i>alea</i> may be associated harmlessly with vertigo, and competition with <i>mimicry</i>. In games of chance, it is indeed common knowledge that a special kind of vertigo seizes both lucky and unlucky players. They are no longer aware of fatigue and are scarcely conscious of what is going on around them.
<!--
They are entranced by the question of where the ball will stop or what card will turn up. They lose all objectivity and sometimes gamble more than they have. Casino folklore abounds in anecdotes that are significant in this respect. It is important merely to observe that
-->
...<i>ilinx</i>, which destroys <i>agôn</i>, does not at all rule out alea. It paralyzes, fascinates, and maddens the player, but does not in any way cause him to violate the rules of the game. ...
<!--
It can also be proven that he even becomes more resigned to the results of chance if presuaded to submit to it more completely. <i>Alea</i> presupposes the resignation of the will, and it is
-->
<p align=justify>
[74]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
therefore understandable that states of trance, possession, or hypnosis may develop. Herein lies the true compatibility of the two tendencies.
-->
<p align=justify>
There is an analogous relationship between <i>agôn</i> and <i>mimicry</i>. I have already had occasion to stress that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
every competition is also a spectacle
</mark>
. It unfolds according to identical rules, and with the same anticipation of the outcome. It requires the presence of an audience which crowds about the ticket windows of the stadium or velodrome just as at those of the theater and cinema. The competitors are applauded for each point they score. Their contest has its vicissitudes corresponding to the different acts or scenes in a drama. The point is finally reached where the champion and the star become interchangeable. The two tendencies are also compatible in this respect, for <i>mimicry</i> not only does no harm to <i>agôn</i> but reinforces it, since the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them. In the performance they are expected to do their best, i.e. on the one hand to exhibit perfect discipline and on the other to do their utmost to win.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This actually out-and-out contradicts Lasch. Here, observedness is accountability:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them
</mark>
.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Again, Caillois is open to the objection that he has assumed an ideal audience which has never existed. It may exist, actually, at the lower levels of organized competition. But it does not exist at the mass level, where too much of the audience have something other than victory and defeat that is driving them to watch. e.g. There is a storm of ludic and spectatorial "corruption" gathering around the growth of women's sports, as a few perceptive and courageous commentators have pointed out.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br><br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
3. Fundamental Relationships
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
<br>
The cases in which there is a basic compatibility between the principles of play remain to be described. Nothing is more noteworthy in this regard than the exact symmetry between the natures of <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>: parallel and complementary. Both require absolute equity, an equality of mathematical chances of almost absolute precision. Admirably precise rules, meticulous measures, and scientific calculations are evident. However, the two kinds of games have opposite ways of designating the winner. ...
<!--
As has been seen, in one the player counts only upon himself and in the other on everything except himself. To put all one's personal resources to work is contrasted with the deliberate refusal to use them. However, between the two extremes—represented for example by chess and dice or football and lotteries—lies a
-->
<p align=justify>
[75]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
multitude of games that combine the two attitudes in varying degree, such as card games which are not purely games of chance, dominoes, golf, and many others in which the player's pleasure derives from having done as well as possible in a situation not of his creation, the course of which he alone can only partly control. Chance is represented in the resistance offered by nature, the external world, or the will of the gods to his strength, skill, or knowledge. The game seems like the very image of life, yet an imaginary, ideal, ordered, separate, and limited image. It could not be otherwise, since these are the immutable characteristics of play.
-->
<p align=justify>
In play and games, <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i> are regulated. Without rules,
there can be no competitions or games of chance. At the other extreme, <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i> equally presume a world without rules in which the player constantly improvises, trusting in a guiding fantasy or a supreme inspiration, neither of which is subject to regulation.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Well, again the "play" of theater would thus seem to have nothing to do with
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>mimicry</i>
</mark>
writ large, even though there <i>is</i> literal "mimicry" involved. Theater "players" are profoundly
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
rule</mark>bound. They only <i>appear</i> unbound (it is perhaps the core of their mandate to appear unbound) to the audience. But Caillois does not seem to be describing the audience when he refers to theater as <i>mimicry</i>; and if he is, the possibility (conventionally, the likelihood) that this appearance is not only illusory but also contrary, this possibility would seem to demand its own accounting. (He does seem to be describing the audience when applying <i>mimicry</i> to spectacular competiton, so maybe I'm missing something.)
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
In <i>agôn</i>, the player relies directly on his will, while in <i>alea</i> he renounces it. In <i>mimicry</i> the awareness of simulation and make-believe is presupposed while the gist of vertigo and ecstasy is to erase such awareness.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In other words, a kind of split personality is observed in simulation between the real personality and the role of the actor. In vertigo, on the contrary, there is disorder and panic, if not a total eclipse of consciousness. But a fatal situation is created by the fact that simulation in itself generates both vertigo and split personality, the source of panic. Pretending to be someone else tends to alienate and transport. Wearing a mask is intoxicating and liberating. As a result the conjunction of mask and trance, in this dangerous domain where perception becomes distorted, is very frightening. It provokes such seizures and paroxysms that the real world is temporarily abolished in the mind that is hallucinated or possessed.
-->
<p align=justify>
The combination of <i>alea</i> and <i>agôn</i> is a free act of will stemming from the satisfaction felt in overcoming an arbitrarily conceived and voluntarily accepted obstacle. The alliance of mimicry and ilinx leads to an inexorable, total frenzy which in its most
<p align=justify>
[76]
<p align=justify>
obvious forms appears to be the opposite of play, an indescribable metamorphosis in the conditions of existence. The fit so provoked, being uninhibited, seems to remove the player as far from the authority, values, and influence of the real world,...
<!--
as the real world seems to influence the formal, protected, regulated, and protected activities that characterize the wholly inhibited games subsumed under the rules of <i>agôn</i> and <i>alea</i>.
-->
The association of simulation and vertigo is so powerful and so inseparable that it is naturally part of the sphere of the sacred,...
<!--
perhaps providing one of the principal bases for the terror and fascination of the sacred.
-->
<p align=justify>
The quality of such sorcery seems to me to be invincible, to the degree that I am not surprised that it has taken ages to free man from this illusion. This has been achieved by what is commonly called civilization. I believe that the attainment of civilization everywhere is the result of a kind of wager made under different conditions in various places. I will try, in this second part of the book, to speculate about the general lines of this decisive revolution. ...
<!--
At the end, using an improvised approach, I will try to determine how the divorce or fissure was produced, which secretly condemns the conjunction of vertigo and simulation while nearly everybody believes them to be ineradicably
permanent.
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This is either the skeleton key to understanding right-extremism or a textbook piece of midcentury ethnocentrism, depending on who it is being said about and by whom.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<center>
%%
</center>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In addition, before beginning the examination of the significant displacement of the world of the mask and ecstasy by that of merit and chance, there is still another basis for symmetry that must be briefly noted in these introductory pages.
-->
We have just seen that <i>alea</i> and <i>agôn</i>, like <i>mimicry</i> and <i>ilinx</i>, can be readily combined. However at the same time, within the mixture, it is remarkable that one of the elements in the compound is always active and creative and the other is passive and destructive.
<p align=justify>
Competition and simulation may and indeed do create cultural forms to which an educational or esthetic value is readily ascrib-
<p align=justify>
[77]
<p align=justify>
able. Stable and influential institutions are frequently and almost inevitably derived from them. Regulated competition is in fact, equivalent to sports, and simulation, conceived as play, is nothing other than the theater. The pursuit of chance and vertigo, on the other hand, with rare exceptions leads to nothing and creates nothing that can be developed or established. It frequently
happens that they paralyze, interrupt, or destroy.
<p align=justify>
It does not seem difficult to find the root of such inequality. ...
<!--
In the first combination, which governs the world of rules,
-->
<i>alea</i> and <i>agôn</i> express attitudes diametrically opposed with regard to the will. <i>Agôn</i>, the desire and effort to win a victory, implies that the champion relies upon his own resources. ...
<!--
He wants to triumph, to prove his supremacy. Nothing is more creative than such an ambition.
-->
<i>Alea</i>, on the contrary, seems to be a foregone acceptance of the verdict of destiny. ...
<!--
This compliance signifies that the player submits to a roll of the dice, that he will do nothing but throw them and read the number that comes up. The rule is that he abstain from motions that might falsify or infuence the outcome.
-->
<p align=justify>
Both of these are certainly symmetrical ways of assuring perfect equilibrium and absolute equity among the competitors. However, one involves a struggle of the will against external obstacles and the other entails submission of the will to a supposed omen. ...
<!--
Emulation is also continuous exercise and good training for human faculties and capacities, while fatalism is basically passivity. The first attitude requires the development of personal superiority and the other requires one to wait, motionless and silent, for a wholly external consecration or doom. It is not surprising in these circumstances that knowledge and skill aid and reward <i>agôn</i>, while magic, superstition, and the study of miracles and coincidences are invariable accompaniments of the uncertainties of <i>alea</i>.
-->
<p align=justify>
In the chaotic universe of simulation and vertigo an identical polarity is confirmable.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>Mimicry</i> consists in deliberate impersonation
</mark>
, which may readily become a work of art, contrivance, or
<p align=justify>
[78]
<p align=justify>
cunning. The actor must work out his role and create a dramatic illusion. He is compelled to concentrate and always have his wits about him, just like the athlete in competition.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Conversely in <i>ilinx</i>
</mark>
, in this regard comparable to <i>alea</i>,
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
there is submission not only of the will but of the mind
</mark>
. The person lets himself drift and becomes intoxicated through feeling directed, dominated, and possessed by strange powers. To attain them, he need only abandon himself, since the exercise of no special aptitude is required.
<p align=justify>
Just as the peril in games of chance is to be unable to limit the stakes, in this case the danger lies in not being able to end the disorder that has been accepted. ...
<!--
In these negative games, it would seem they would give rise to an increasing capacity of resistance to their fascination. However, the contrary is true. For this aptitude has no meaning except in relation to the obsessive temptation, so that it is continuously tormenting and naturally tends to disorder. It cannot be converted. One is exposed to it until one succumbs.
-->
Games of simulation lead to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the arts of the spectacle
</mark>
, which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
express and reflect a culture
</mark>
. The individual pursuit of anxiety and panic
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
conquers
</mark>
man's discernment and will. He becomes a prisoner of equivocal and exalting ecstasies in which he believes that he is divine and immortal, ecstasies which in the end destroy him.
<br><br>
Thus,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
in each of the major combinations only one category of play is truly creative
</mark>
: <i>mimicry</i> in the conjuring of masks and vertigo and <i>agôn</i> in regulated rivalry and chance.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
The others
</mark>
are
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
immediately destructive
</mark>
. They result in inordinate, inhuman, and irremediable excitations, a kind of frightening and fatal attraction, the import of which is to neutralize creative influence. In societies ruled by simulation and hypnosis, the result occurs at the moment when the spectacle borders on the trance, that is to say, when the sorcerer's mask becomes a theater mask. In societies based upon the combination of merit and chance, there is also an incessant effort, not always successful or rapid, to augment the role of justice to the detriment of that of chance.
This effort is called progress.
<p align=justify>
[79]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
It is now time to examine games of double combinations (simulation and vertigo on the one hand, chance and merit on the other), along with the supposed vicissitudes of the human adventure, as it is designated in contemporary ethnography and history.
-->
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***unobservedness again***
<br>
COMBINE with comment to (ii)
</h5>
<i>"I have already had occasion to stress that every competition is also a spectacle. ... The competitors are applauded for each point they score. Their contest has its vicissitudes corresponding to the different acts or scenes in a drama. The point is finally reached where the champion and the star become interchangeable. The two tendencies are also compatible in this respect, for <i>mimicry</i> not only does no harm to <i>agôn</i> but reinforces it, since the competitors must not deceive the audience... In the performance they are expected to do their best,..."</i>
(p. 74)
(<a href="http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-iv.html">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-30503937883641662652023-07-11T19:46:00.001-07:002023-07-11T19:50:26.995-07:00Caillois—MPG (iii)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<br><br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[43]
</p>
<br>
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER IV
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
The Corruption of Games
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<br><br><br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Where the problem is to enumerate the characteristics that define the nature of play, it appears to be an activity that is (1) free, (2) separate, (3) uncertain, (4) unproductive, (5) regulated, and (6) fictive, it being understood that the last two characteristics tend to exclude one another.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
These six purely formal qualities are not clearly related to the various psychological attitudes that govern play.
-->
In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.
<p align=justify>
At this point, it may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life is blurred. They certainly cannot spread beyond the playing field (chess- or checkerboard, arena, racetrack, stadium, or stage) or time that is reserved for them, and which ends as inexorably as the closing of a parenthe-
<p align=justify>
[44]
<p align=justify>
sis. They will necessarily have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms.
<p align=justify>
In addition,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
a strict and absolute code governs amateur players, whose prior assent seems like the very condition of their participation
</mark>
in an isolated and entirely conventional activity. But
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
what if the convention is no longer accepted
</mark>
...
<!--
or regarded as applicable?
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Suppose the isolation is no longer respected?
</mark>
The forms or the freedom of play surely can no longer survive. All that remains is the tyrannical and compelling psychological attitude that selects one kind of game to play rather than another.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Again, this is slightly Laschian. Compare to <i>The Revolt of the Elites</i> [p. 87; "Crisis of Competence," 3 dec 2021]
<blockquote>
<i>
[87] The call for models of heroism "common to all" seems to threaten the pluralism of ethical commitments that democracy is obliged to protect. In the absence of common standards, however, tolerance becomes indifference, and cultural pluralism degenerates into an aesthetic spectacle... However, our neighbors themselves, as individuals, are never held up to any kind of judgment. ... The questions that allegedly divide us beyond hope of compromise turn out to be lifestyle questions, in the jargon of the day. ... In this context, the question that really matters—How should I live?—also becomes a matter of taste...
</i>
</blockquote>
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
It should be recalled that these distinctive attitudes are four in number: the desire to win by one's merit in regulated competition (<i>agôn</i>), the submission of one's will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop (<i>alea</i>), the desire to assume a strange personality (<i>mimicry</i>), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (<i>ilinx</i>).
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
In <i>agôn</i>,
</mark>
the player relies
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
only upon himself
</mark>
and his utmost efforts;
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
in alea,
</mark>
he counts on
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
everything except himself,
</mark>
submitting to the powers that elude him;
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
in <i>mimicry</i>,
</mark>
he
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
imagines that he is someone else,
</mark>
and he invents an imaginary universe;
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
in <i>ilinx</i>,
</mark>
he gratifies the desire to
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium,
</mark>
escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.
<p align=justify>
If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives, what happens when every convention is rejected? When the universe of play is no longer tightly closed? When it is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? Corresponding
to each of the basic categories there is a specific perversion which results from the absence of both restraint and protection.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The rule of instinct again becoming absolute, the tendency to interfere with the isolated, sheltered, and neutralized kind of play spreads to daily life and tends to subordinate it to its own needs, as much as possible. What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and
what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[45]
<p align=justify>
The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now necessary to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
take precautions
</mark>
against
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
cheats
</mark>
and
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
professional players
</mark>
, a unique product of
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the contagion of reality.
</mark>
Basically, it is not a perversion of play, but a sidetracking derived from one of the four primary impulses governing play. The situation is not unique. It occurs whenever the specified instinct does not encounter, in an appropriate game, the discipline and refuge that anchor it, or whenever it does not find gratification in the game.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The cheat is still inside the universe of play.
</mark>
If he violates the rules of the game, he at least pretends to respect them. He tries to influence them.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
He is dishonest, but hypocritical.
</mark>
</blockquote>
Typo?!
<blockquote>
He thus, by his attitude, safeguards and
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
proclaims the validity of the conventions he violates,
</mark>
because he is dependent upon others obeying the rules. If he is caught, he is thrown out. The universe of play remains intact. Neither does the professional player change the nature of the game in any way. To be sure,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
he himself does not play, but merely practices a profession
</mark>
. The nature of competition or the performance is hardly modified if the athletes or comedians are professionals who play for money rather than amateurs who play for pleasure. The difference concerns only the players.
<p align=justify>
For professional boxers, bicycle riders, or actors, <i>agôn</i> or <i>mimicry</i> has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive and exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their subsistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems, from which they properly find relaxation by playing at a game to which they are not contracted.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Yep. But <i>how would we know</i> if the same were not true of the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
oppress</mark>ed,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
exhaust</mark>ed
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
work</mark>er? What is the basis, really, for the ascription of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
relaxation
</mark>
?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
For the actor also
</mark>
, a theatrical performance is
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
mere simulation
</mark>
. He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality
</mark>
. The separation of the two universes remains absolute. ...
<!--
For the professional bicycle rider, tennis or football player also, the contest, match, and track remain regulated and formal competition.
-->
As soon as the contest ends, the audience runs for the exit. The champion returns to his routine responsibilities,...
<!--
where he must
-->
<p align=justify>
[46]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
protect his interests, devise and apply a strategy that will assure him a successful future.
-->
As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possible give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way.
<!--
The latter are insidious, incessant, and implacable, and permeate all of life. Life,
-->
...the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Outside of the arena
</mark>
, after the gong strikes, begins
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
the true perversion of <i>agôn</i>
</mark>
, the most pervasive of all the categories.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play.
</mark>
Now competition is nothing but a law of nature. In society it resumes its
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
original brutality
</mark>
, as soon as it finds a
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
loophole
</mark>
in the system of moral, social, and legal constraints, which have limits and conventions comparable to those of play. That is why mad, obsessive ambition, applied to any domain in which the rules of the game and free play are not respected, must be denounced as a clear deviation which in this case restores the original situation.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
There is no better example of
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the civilizing role of play
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
than the
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
inhibitions
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
it usually places upon natural avidity.
</mark>
A good player must be able to contemplate with objectivity, detachment, and at least an appearance of calm, the unlucky results of even the most sustained effort or the loss of large sums. The referee's decision is accepted in principle even if unjust.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
The corruption of <i>agôn</i> begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Clearly aimed at certain Social Darwinist theories, and especially at the reductionism of "Greed is good." Not even mere
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
natural avidity
</mark>
can be good in and of itself, to say nothing of "ambition" or "greed."
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
As for rules and their enforcement, if compliance is (generically) the highest priority, there is a certain wisdom in letting the rules emerge from necessity rather than imposing them out of desire. Too many people just dislike following rules, dislike it enough to be unamenable to being asked nicely. So necessity is the only safe bet. But that means (probably) not getting what you want.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
And as for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
the civilizing role of play
</mark>
, again (and again) we are baited here with the Sociologist's classical resolution of a chicken-or-egg proposition cleanly and totally in favor of the egg. It is no less plausible that this ideal form of play emerges only when certain broader "civilizing" processes are already afoot. But that direction of travel is a less appealing conversation starter, apparently.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
games of chance
</mark>
, there is a comparable corruption of the principle as soon as the player <mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
ceases to respect chance
</mark>
, that is, when he no longer views the laws of chance as
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
impersonal neutral power
</mark>
, without heart or memory, a purely mechanical effect.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
With superstition, the corruption of <i>alea</i> is born.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This is Scrabble.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
It is indeed tempting for one who submits to fate to try to predict the outcome, or at least influence it in his favor. The player finds special significance in all kinds of phenomena, encounters, and
-->
<p align=justify>
[47]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
omens, which he imagines to be forebodings of good or bad luck. He looks for talismans that will protect him most efficaciously. He abstains from anything unlucky, as revealed by dreams, forebodings, or presentiments. Finally, in order to be rid of unlucky influences, he indulges in various magical practices.
-->
<p align=justify>
Such an attitude is only aggravated by games of chance. It is found to be quite prevalent, even if subconscious. It is not restricted to the habitués of casinos or racetracks and the purchasers of lottery tickets. The regular publication of horoscopes by daily and weekly newspapers transforms each day and each week into a kind of promise or menace for their readers,...
<!--
who are thus kept in suspense by the heavens and the dark powers of the stars. These horoscopes most often reveal the daily lucky number for readers born under the different signs of the Zodiac. Each one can then buy the lottery tickets corresponding to these numbers: some ending with that number, some in which that number is contained several times, and some with a succession of numbers that add up to it—thus applicable to all to some degree. It is significant that the most popular and most obvious superstition of this type is directly associated with games of chance. And yet it must be admitted that it is not limited to games of chance.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Upon waking up in the morning, everyone is supposed to find himself winning or losing in a gigantic, ceaseless, gratuitous, and inevitable lottery which will determine his general coefficient of success or failure for the next twenty-four hours. Decisions, new enterprises, and love affairs are all considered. The astrologer is careful to point out that the influence of the stars is exerted within quite variable limits, so that the oversimplified prophecy could scarcely turn out to be entirely false. To be sure, the reaction of the majority of the public is to smile at such puerile predictions. But it still reads them. And more important, it keeps on reading them. At this point, many begin reading the astrological section of their newspaper. It seems that newspapers with large circulations do not readily risk depriving their readers of this
-->
<p align=justify>
[48]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
satisfaction, the importance or prevalence of which should not be underestimated.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The more credulous are not content with the summary articles in papers and general magazines. They have recourse to specialized periodicals. In Paris, one of these has a circulation of more than 100,000. The adept often visit a fortuneteller with some regularity.
-->
The figures are quite revealing: 100,000 Parisians consult 6,000 diviners, seers, or fortunetellers daily. According to the <i>Institut national de Statistique</i>, 34 billion francs are spent annually in France on astrologers, magicians, and other frauds. In the United States, for astrology alone, a 1953 investigation counted 30,000 professional establishments, twenty specialized magazines with a circulation of 500,000 readers, and 2,000 periodicals that publish horoscopes. ...
<!--
It was estimated that $200 million are spent annually for no other purpose than seeking answers from the stars-_this not including other methods of divination.
-->
<p align=justify>
Numerous indications of the association between games of chance and divination are easily found. One of the most conspicuous and immediate is that the very same cards used by players in trying their luck may also be used by prophets to predict the future. Seers only use special games in order to enhance their prestige. Ordinary dinner plates may be used, newly inscribed with naive legends, impressive illustrations, or traditional allegories. At every point there is a quite natural transition from chance to superstition.
<br><br>
As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good fortune, it probably compensates for the continuous tension involved in modern competition.
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to trust in destiny.
</mark>
Excessively rigorous competition discourages the timid and tempts them to rely on external powers. ...
<!--
By studying and utilizing heavenly powers over chance, they try to get the reward they doubt can be won by their own qualities, by hard work and steady application. Rather than persist in thankless labor, they ask the cards or the stars
-->
<p align=justify>
[49]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
to warn them of the propitious moment for the success of their enterprises.
-->
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
Superstition
</mark>
therefore seems to be a
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
perversion
</mark>
, i.e. the
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
application to reality
</mark>
of one of the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
principles of play
</mark>
, <i>alea</i>, which causes one to expect nothing of himself and leaves all to chance.
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
The corruption of <i>mimicry</i> follows a parallel course.
</mark>
It is produced when
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
simulation
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
is no longer accepted as such
</mark>
, when
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
the one who is disguised
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real
</mark>
. He no longer <i>plays another</i>. Persuaded that he is the other, he behaves as if he were, forgetting his own self. The loss of his real identity is a punishment for his inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality. It is properly called <i>alienation</i>.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
So, the "effect on the players themselves" is <i>alienation</i>. What about the spectators? They too can become convinced that theatrical
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
<i>mimicry</i>
</mark>
is real.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Conventionally, to say what I have just said is to court absurdity. In the case of live theater, we can assume that no one gets confused as to what is "real" and what is staged. McLuhan's various tribespeople are, conventionally if not in point of fact, rhetorical rather than representative examples. Were such a person actually to show up in a Broadway theater audience, we could discuss that through an entirely different lens than the one I am looking through here.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Rather, with specific regard to the culturally initiated, what I mean is that it is very difficult to be treated to a <i>highly topical</i> theatrical presentation (as most of them quite intentionally and explicitly are nowadays) and <i>not</i> be subject to some creeping reinterpretation and reformation of viewpoint. The only way this is possible, actually, is if you are so unengaged by the performance that you for all intents haven't experienced the performance at all. If you can remember it, you almost certainly will be influenced by it. <p style="margin-right: 30%">
Whether this influence bears any resemblance to that intended by writers, directors, designers, actors, or critics is another question entirely; as is that of your conscious thoughts about your having been influenced. It may be (I would say it usually is) very difficult to say much concretely about the <i>abstract reality</i> of all of this; and that is why nothing people <i>do</i> say about it is worth a damn aside from itself forming the basis of a certain kind of "play" which even the hardheaded realists among these various metiers seem to enjoy, perhaps actually to need.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The point of insisting on all of this is not merely to play the hardheaded realist role for its own sake. The point is to argue that this "creeping reformation" can fairly be categorized as a
corruption
of play, wherein
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
simulation
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
is no longer accepted as such
</mark>
</blockquote>
,
<br>
and wherein
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: orange; color: blue">
the one who is disguised
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Just as the actor's
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality.
</mark>
</blockquote>
leads to
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
The loss of his real identity
</mark>
</blockquote>
as
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
a punishment
</mark>
</blockquote>
,
<br>
avid consumers of theatrical and narrative didacticism
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
los</mark>e
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
the messages they aspire to receive and the messages they think they receive in the shuffle of "creeping reformation," though if you ask them they will insist nothing of the sort could be occurring.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
This reception-side analog to "the effect on the players themselves" just as well
<blockquote>
<mark style="background-color: blue; color: orange">
is properly called <i>alienation</i>.
</mark>
</blockquote>
.
<br>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Here, too,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
play is a protection from danger
</mark>
. The actor's role is sharply defined by the dimensions of the stage and the duration of the spectacle. Once he leaves the magic area, the fantasy ends and the most vainglorious histrionics and the most eloquent performances are brutally constrained by the very necessity of passing from the dressing-room of the theater to the resumption of his own personality.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
And again, the same may be said of <i>topical</i> instrumentalization: when the movie or the book or the show shapes our construction of reality, we are in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
danger
</mark>
of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
corrupti</mark>ng whatever view we have formed otherwise; whereas the atopical play of aesthetics
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
protect</mark>s
us.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
Applause is not merely approval and reward. It marks the end of illusion and play. The masked ball ends at dawn and the carnival is only for a short time. The costume is returned to the store or the wardrobe. The old personality is restored. The sharp limits of play prevent alienation.
-->
<p align=justify>
Alienation occurs toward the end of profound and continuous labor. It takes place when there is no sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality, when the subject has gradually donned a second, chimerical, and all-pervasive personality which
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
claims exorbitant rights with respect to a reality with which it is of necessity incompatible
</mark>
.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
As good a description of <i>topical</i> entertainment as any.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
The time arrives when the alienated one—who has become another—tries desperately to deny, subdue, or destroy this new self, which strongly resists, and which he regards as inadmissible, inconceivable, and irksome.
<p align=justify>
It is remarkable that in <i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, and <i>mimicry</i>, the intensity of play may be the cause of the fatal deviation. The latter always
results from contamination by ordinary life. It is produced when
<p align=justify>
[50]
<p align=justify>
the instinct that rules play spreads beyond the strict limits of time and place, without previously agreed-to rules. It is permissible to play as seriously as desired, to be extremely extravagant, to risk an entire fortune, even life itself, but the game must stop at a preordained time so that the player may resume ordinary responsibilities, where the liberating and isolating rules of play no longer are applicable.
<p align=justify>
Competition is a law of modern life. Taking risks is no longer contradictory to reality. Simulation also has a role, as in the case of confidence men, spies, and fugitives. As a compensation, vertigo is almost absent except for those rare professions in which the task is to control it. The risk of sudden death is also present. At fairs, special precautions are taken to avoid accidents on the various rides that stimulate vertigo artificially. Accidents nevertheless happen even on equipment designed and constructed to assure complete safety to the users, through having undergone careful periodic checks. Physical vertigo, an extreme condition depriving the patient of protection, is as difficult to attain as it is dangerous to experience. That is why the search for unconsciousness and distortion of perception, in order to spread into daily life, must assume forms very different from those observed on contraptions that gyrate, speed, fall, or propel and which were devised to stimulate vertigo in the closed and protected world of play.
<br><br>
These costly, complex, cumbersome installations are scarce except for amusement parks in capitals or when erected periodically by traveling carnivals. In their very atmosphere, they belong to the universe of play. In addition, the thrills they provide correspond point for point to the definition of play: they are brief, intermittent, calculated, and as discrete as games or successive encounters. And finally, they remain independent of the real world. Their influence is limited to the duration of the ride. It stops as soon as the machine stops and leaves no trace in the rider except for his being fleetingly stunned until his usual equilibrium is restored.
<br><br>
[51]
<br><br>
To adapt vertigo to daily life, it is necessary to substitute ambiguous chemical power for clear-cut physical effects. The desired stimulus or sensuous panic, which is brutally and brusquely provided by the amusements at a fair, is now sought in drugs or alcohol. But this time the whirling is no longer outside or separate from reality. It is imbedded and generated there. If this intoxication and euphoria can temporarily destroy clarity of vision and motor coordination, free one from the burden of memory and from the terrors of social responsibilities and pressures, just as in the case of physical vertigo, nevertheless its influence does not cease with the passing of the seizure. The
organism is slowly but permanently changed. Given a permanent need, there is created an unbearable anxiety. This is in complete contrast to play, which is always contingent and gratuituous activity. Through intoxication, the pursuit of vertigo makes increasing inroads into reality, all the more extensive and pernicious in that it creates a dependency which constantly presses against the threshold across which the desired disorder is found.
<br><br>
Even on this point, the case of insects is instructive. They find a source of pleasure in games of vertigo, illustrated by the whirling mania of whirligig-beetles which transform the surface of the quietest pond into a silvery carousel, if not by moths flitting about a flame. Yet insects, especially the social insects, also exhibit the "corruption of vertigo" in the form of an intoxication that has disastrous consequences.
<br><br>
Thus, one of the most prevalent types of ant, <i>Formica sanguinea</i>, greedily licks up the fragrant exudates of rich ether secreted by the abdominal glands of a small coleopterous insect called <i>Lochemusa strumosa</i>. The ants place its larvae into their nests, feeding them so meticulously that they neglect their own young. Soon the larvae of <i>Lochemusa</i> devour the ants' offspring. The ant queens, badly cared for, will no longer give birth to any
but sterile females. The anthill dies and disappears. <i>Formica tusca</i>, which in a free state kills the <i>Lochemusae</i>, spares them when it is enslaved by <i>Formica sanguinea</i>. To indulge its taste
<br><br>
[52]
<br><br>
for fragrant grease, it permits <i>Atemeles emarginatus</i>, which is no less a peril to its safety, to enter its hive. Moreover, it will destroy this parasite if it is enslaved by <i>Formica rufa</i>, which does not tolerate the parasite, Thus, it is not a case of irresistible attraction, but of a kind of vice that can disappear under certain circumstances. Servitude, in particular, sometimes stimulates it, and sometimes makes it resistible. The masters impose their
habits upon the slaves.
<br><br>
These are not isolated cases of voluntary intoxication. Another species of ant, <i>Iridomyrmex sanguineus</i> of Queensland, seeks the caterpillars of a small grey moth in order to drink the intoxicating liquid they exude. The ants press the juice flesh of these larvae with their mandibles in order to extract the liquid. When they have drained one caterpillar, they move on to another. It is unfortunate that the larvae devour the eggs of <i>Iridomyrmex</i>. Sometimes the insect that produces the fragrant exudate "is aware of" its power and entices the ant to its vice. The caterpillar of <i>Lycaena arion</i>, studied by Chapman and Frohawk, is provided with a sac of honey. When it encounters a
worker of the species <i>Myrmica laevinodis</i>, it raises the anterior segments of its body, inviting the ant to transport it to its nest. There it feeds on the larvae of <i>Myrmica</i>. The latter has no interest in the caterpillar during the periods in which it does not produce any honey. Lastly, a Javanese hemipter, <i>Ptilocerus ochraceus</i>, described by Kirkaldy and Jacobson, has in the middle of its ventral side a gland containing a toxic liquid which it offers to ants that are partial to it. They hasten to lick it up at once. The liquid paralyzes them, and they thus become an easy
prey for <i>Ptilocerus</i>.
<br><br>
The aberrant behavior of ants does not prove the existence of instincts harmful to the species, as has been maintained. It proves rather that the irresistible attraction for a paralyzing substance may neutralize the most powerful instincts, particularly the instinct for self-preservation which causes the individual ant to guard its safety and directs it to protect and feed its offspring. The ants, so to speak, "forget" everything because of the drug.
-->
<p align=justify>
[53]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
They behave most disastrously, submitting themselves or abandoning their eggs and larvae to the enemy.
<p align=justify>
In an oddly analogous way, the stupidity and drunkenness produced by alcohol lead man down a road where he is insidiously and irrevocably destroyed. In the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he is left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo which at least only momentarily compromises his capacity to resist the fascination of oblivion.
-->
<br>
<p align=justify>
As for <i>ludus</i> and <i>paidia</i>, which are not categories of play but
ways of playing, they pass into ordinary life as invariable opposites, e.g. the preference for cacaphony over a symphony, scribbling over the wise application of the laws of perspective.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Fifty-some pages in, we finally get the obligatory swipe at modernism.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
It could be that there is no such thing as a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
preference
</mark>
for disorder, rather that some people find the order where others find only
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
cacophony
</mark>.
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Their continuous opposition arises from the fact that a concerted enterprise, in which various expendable resources are well utilized, has nothing in common with purely disordered movement for the sake of paroxysm.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Admittedly,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
paroxysm
</mark>
does seem to be the extent of many people's interest in modernist works. But not all modernism is maximalism. There are distinctively modernist techniques which deploy limited
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
expendable resources
</mark>
in ways that are oblique (or yes, outright opposed to) classical and commercial notions of order.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
What we set out to analyze was the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
corruption of the principles of play,
</mark>
or preferably,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
their free expansion without check or convention
</mark>
. It was shown that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
such corruption is produced in identical ways
</mark>
. It entails consequences which seem to be inordinately serious.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Madness or intoxication
</mark>
may be
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
sanctions
</mark>
that are
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
disproportionate
</mark>
to the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
simple overflow
</mark>
of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from <i>alea</i> seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one's behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently. He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreciation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and
<p align=justify>
[54]
<p align=justify>
trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are discouraged.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Transposed to reality, the only goal of <i>agôn</i> is success.
</mark>
The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable competition becomes the rule. ...
<!--
Winning even justifies foul blows. If the individual remains inhibited by fear of the law or public opinion, it nonetheless seems permissible, if not meritorious, for nations to wage unlimited ruthless warfare.
-->
<br><br>
<h4>
<center>
Table II
</center>
</h4>
<table style="width:100%; border:1px solid black">
<tr>
AGÔN
Cultural Forms
Found at the
Margins of the
Social Order
Sports
Institutional
Forms Integrated
into Social Life
Corruption
(Competition)
Economic
competition
Competitive
examinations
Violence
Will to power
Trickery
ALEA
(Chance)
Lotteries
Casinos
Hippodromes
Pari-mutuels
Speculation on
stock market
Superstition
Astrology, etc.
MIMICRY
(Simulation)
Carnival
Theater
Cinema
Hero-worship
Uniforms
Ceremonial
etiquette
Alienation
Split personality
ILINX
(Vertigo)
Mountain climbing
Skiing
Tightrope walking
Speed
Professions
requiring
control of
vertigo
Alcoholism
and drugs
</tr>
</table>
<p align=justify>
[55]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
Various restrictions on violence fall into disuse. Operations are no longer limited to frontier provinces, strongholds, and military objectives. They are no longer conducted according to a strategy that once made war itself resemble a game. War is far removed from the tournament or duel, i.e. from regulated
combat in an enclosure, and now finds its fulfillment in massive destruction and the massacre of entire populations.
-->
<p align=justify>
Any corruption of the principles of play means the abandonment of those precarious and doubtful conventions that it is always permissible, if not profitable, to deny, but the arduous adoption of which is a milestone in the development of civilizaton.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts</mark>
(competition, chance, simulation, vertigo),
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is readily understood that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal and circumscribed conditions
</mark>
, which in every case prevail in the rules of play.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Is it possible to hang onto this part while reserving some skepticism for the next two assertions?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous consequences.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
But they <i>can</i>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
lead to
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
disastrous consequences
</mark>
through play also. The whole previous section has been devoted to explaining how this happens. Do people who generally have trouble following rules really learn how to do this by playing? Or do they have the same trouble playing that they have in other areas of life?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Games discipline instincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and immunize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The problem with mere
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
formal and limited satisfaction
</mark>
is that its powers of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
educat</mark>ion,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
enrich</mark>ment,
and
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
immuniz</mark>ation
are also
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
limited
</mark>
in direct proportion. So while evidence can undoutedly be found, somewhere, for such top-down effects, it can hardly be assumed that we have <i>the right amount</i> just because we have <i>some</i>, somewhere.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I would propose that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
corruption
</mark>
has found a way to survive and thrive throughout some drastic changes in
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
various patterns of culture
</mark>
. This alone is grounds for skepticism of the above.
</p>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr>
<h5>
***this connects explicitly to McLuhan's lost "effect on the the players themselves"***
<br>
COMBINE with previous comment from (i)
</h5>
<i>"For the actor also , a theatrical performance is mere simulation. He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality. The separation of the two universes remains absolute."</i>
(p. 45)
<i>"As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possible give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way. ...the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.
"Outside of the arena, after the gong strikes, begins the true perversion of <i>agôn</i>,... It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play. ... There is no better example of the civilizing role of play than the inhibitions it usually places upon natural avidity. ... The referee's decision is accepted in principle even if unjust. The corruption of <i>agôn</i> begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized."</i>
(p. 46)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-iii.html">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32978906.post-32074050970433461602023-07-11T19:42:00.001-07:002023-07-11T19:44:01.848-07:00Caillois—MPG (ii)<br>
<p>
Roger Caillois
<br>
trans. Meyer Barash
<br>
<i>Man, Play and Games</i> (1961)
</p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[27]
<br><br>
<center>
<font size=4>
<i>
2. From Turbulence to Rules
</i>
</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>
Rules are inseparable from play as soon as the latter becomes institutionalized. From this moment on they become part of its nature. They transform it into an instrument of fecund and decisive culture. But a basic freedom is central to play in order to stimulate distraction and fantasy. This liberty is its indispensable motive power and is basic to the most complex and carefully organized forms of play. Such a primary power of improvisation and joy, which I call <i>paidia</i>, is allied to the taste for gratuitous difficulty that I propose to call <i>ludus</i>, in order to encompass the various games to which, without exaggeration, a civilizing quality can be attributed. In fact,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
they reflect the moral and intellectual values of a culture, as well as contribute to their refinement and development.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Does he not notice that the double-thesis of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
reflect</mark>ion
and
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
contribut</mark>ion
pulls the pin on the grenade that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
basic freedom</mark>
is standing on?
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The double-thesis forms the basis for the instrumentalization of culture, at which point play can no longer be
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>
Free,
<br>
Separate,
<br>
Uncertain
<br>
</i>
</mark>
or
<br>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>
Unproductive
</i>
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
(pp. 9-10).
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
I have chosen the term <i>paidia</i> because its root is the word for child,...
<!--
and also because of a desire not to needlessly disconcert the reader by resorting to a term borrowed from an antipodal language. However, the Sanskrit <i>kredati</i> and the Chinese <i>wan</i> seem both richer and more expressive through the variety and nature of their connotations. It is true that they also present the disadvantages of overabundance—a certain danger of confusion,
for one. <i>Kredati</i> designates the play of adults, children, and animals. It applies more specifically to gamboling, i.e. to the sudden and capricious movements provoked by a superabundance of gaiety and vitality. It applies equally to illicit sex relationships, the rise and fall of waves, and anything that undulates with the wind. The word <i>wan</i> is even more explicit, as much for what it defines as for what it avoids defining, i.e. specifying games of skill, competition, simulation, and chance. It manifests many refinements of meaning to which I will have occasion to return.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
In view of these relationships and semantic qualifications, what can be the connotations and denotations of the term <i>paidia?</i>
-->
I shall define it, for my purposes, as a word covering the
<p align=justify>
[28]
<p align=justify>
spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct: a cat entangled in a ball of wool, a dog sniffing, and an infant laughing at his rattle represent the first identifiable examples of this type of activity. It intervenes in every happy exuberance which effects an immediate and disordered agitation, an impulsive and easy recreation, but readily carried to excess, whose impromptu and unruly character remains its essential if not unique reason for being. ...
<!--
From somersaults to scribbling, from squabble to uproar, perfectly clear illustrations are not lacking of the comparable symptoms of movements, colors, or noises.
-->
<p align=justify>
This elementary need for disturbance and tumult first appears as an impulse to touch, grasp, taste, smell, and then drop any accessible object. It readily can become a taste for destruction and breaking things. ...
<!--
It explains the pleasure in endlessly cutting up paper with a pair of scissors, pulling cloth into thread, breaking up a gathering, holding up a queue, disturbing the play or work of others, etc. Soon comes the desire to mystify or to defy by sticking out the tongue or grimacing while seeming to touch or throw the forbidden object.
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
For the child it is a question of expressing himself, of feeling he is the <i>cause</i>, of forcing others to pay attention to him.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
How's <i>that</i> for
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
express</mark>ion?
<p style="margin-left: 2%; margin-right: 30%">
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
feeling he is the <i>cause</i>
</mark>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Isn't <i>much</i> expression
<br>
really about that
<br>
and not at all about
<br>
that-which-is-purportedly-expressed?
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In this manner, K. Groos recalls the case of a monkey which took pleasure in pulling the tail of a dog that lived with it, each time that the dog seemed to be going to sleep. ...
<!--
The primitive joy in destruction and upset has been notably observed by the sister of G. J. Romanes in precise and most meaningful detail.
-->
<p align=justify>
The child does not stop at that. He loves to play with his own pain, for example by probing a toothache with his tongue. He also likes to be frightened. He thus looks for a physical illness, limited and controlled, of which he is the cause, or sometimes he seeks an anxiety that he, being the cause, can stop at will. At various points, the fundamental aspects of play are already
recognizable, i.e. voluntary, agreed upon, isolated, and regulated activity.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Soon there is born the desire to invent rules, and to abide by them whatever the cost.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I know not whether the suggestion of, in this case, phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, has any merit, but this rule-making and rule-following impulse seems important. Elsewhere people (especially children) absolutely loathe following rules; that is, other people's rules.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Conversely, when we made the rules ourselves, following them becomes self-enhancing. It follows that we probably made them self-interestedly in the first place, and this this self-interestedness is reflected not merely in our commitment to them but in the very structure of the rules themselves, at least to some degree.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
I court tedium in pursuing this point only to say:
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
abid</mark>ing
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
by
</mark>
rules we did not make ourselves,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
whatever the cost
</mark>
, this is not easily attained; and so where it is in evidence we might do well for look for other self-enhancing features of the engagement. We might do well to seek the explanation in base animal motives rather than in noble intellectualized ones, even/especially when the behavior in question is itself
garnering our attention <i>precisely</i> for being (apparently) noble and intellectualized. Which is merely to reiterate a prior point. But it is a point that is missed too often, I think.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
The child then makes all kinds of bets—
-->
<p align=justify>
[29]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
which, as has been seen, are the elementary forms of <i>agôn</i>—with himself or his friends. He hops, walks backwards with his eyes closed, plays at who can look longest at the sun, and will suffer pain or stand in a painful position.
-->
<p align=justify>
In general, the first manifestations of <i>paidia</i> have no name and could not have any, precisely because they are not part of any order, distinctive symbolism, or clearly differentiated life that would permit a vocabulary to consecrate their autonomy with a specific term. But as soon as conventions, techniques, and utensils emerge, the first games as such arise with them:...
<!--
e.g. leapfrog, hide and seek, kite-flying, teetotum, sliding, blindman's buff, and doll-play.
-->
At this point the contradictory roads of <i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i>, and <i>ilinx</i> begin to bifurcate. At the same time, the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed for this purpose also intervenes, so that reaching a solution has no other goal than personal satisfaction for its own sake.
<p align=justify>
This condition, which is <i>ludus</i> proper, is also reflected in different kinds of games, except for those which wholly depend upon the cast of a die. It is complementary to and a refinement of <i>paidia</i>, which it disciplines and enriches. It provides an occasion for training and normally leads to the acquisition of a special skill, a particular mastery of the operation of one or
another contraption or the discovery of a satisfactory solution to problems of a more conventional type.
<p align=justify>
The difference from <i>agôn</i> is that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
in <i>ludus</i> the tension and skill of the player are not related to any explicit feeling of emulation or rivalry: the conflict is with the obstacle, not with one or several competitors.
</mark>
...
<!--
On the level of manual dexterity there can be cited games such as cup-and-ball, diabolo, and yo-yo. These simple instruments merely utilize basic natural laws, e.g. gravity and rotation in the case of the yo-yo, where the point is to transform a rectilinear alternating motion into a continuous circular movement. Kite-flying, on the contrary, relies on the exploitation of a specific atmospheric condition. Thanks to this, the player accomplishes a kind of auscultation upon the sky from
-->
<p align=justify>
[30]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
afar. He projects his presence beyond the limits of his body. Again, the game of blindman's buff offers an opportunity to experience the quality of perception in the absence of sight. It is readily seen that the possibilities of <i>ludus</i> are almost infinite.
-->
<p align=justify>
Games such as solitaire or the ring puzzle, although part of the same species, already belong to another group of games, since they constantly appeal to a spirit of calculation and contrivance. ...
<!--
And lastly, crossword puzzles, mathematical recreations, anagrams, olorhymes and obscure poetry, addiction to detective stories (trying to identify the culprit), and chess or bridge problems constitute, even in the absence of gadgets, many varieties of the most prevalent and pure forms of <i>ludus</i>.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is common knowledge that what to begin with seems to be a situation susceptible to indefinite repetition turns out to be capable of producing ever new combinations. Thus the player is stimulated to emulate himself, permitting him to take pride in his accomplishment, as against those who share his taste. <mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
There is a manifest relationship between <i>ludus</i> and <i>agôn</i>.
</mark>
In addition, it can happen that the same game may possess both, e.g. chess
or bridge.
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
The combination of <i>ludus</i> and <i>alea</i> is no less frequent
</mark>
: it is especially recognizable in games of patience, in which ingenious maneuvers have little influence upon the result,...
<!--
and in playing slot machines in which the player can very crudely calculate the impulsion given to the ball at various points in directing its course. In both these examples, chance is still the deciding factor. Moreover, the fact that the player is not completely helpless and that he can at least minimally count on his skill or talent is sufficient reason to link <i>ludus</i> with <i>alea</i>.
-->
<p align=justify>
<i>Ludus</i> is also readily compatible with <i>mimicry</i>. In the simplest
cases, it lends aspects of illusion to construction games such as the animals made out of millet stalks by Dogon children,...
<!--
the cranes or automobiles constructed by fitting together perforated steel parts and pullies from an Erector set, or the scale-model planes or ships that even adults do not disdain meticulously constructing.
-->
However,
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is the theater which provides the basic
</mark>
<p align=justify>
[31]
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
connection between the two, by disciplining <i>mimicry</i> until it becomes an art rich in a thousand diverse routines, refined techniques, and subtly complex resources. By means of this fortunate development, the cultural fecundity of play is amply demonstrated.
</mark>
</blockquote>
But by the time of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
diverse routines, refined techniques, and subtly complex resources
</mark>
, <i>who</i> is <i>really</i> still playing? Certainly not "the players themselves," upon whom "the effect" of play is "lost" in the complexities. And if it is the audience who is actually playing, then they are not playing within the realm of routines and techniques.
<blockquote>
<br><br>
In contrast, just as there could be no relationship between <i>paidia</i>, which is tumultuous and exuberant, and alea, which is passive anticipation of and mute immobility pending the outcome of the game, there also can be no connection between <i>ludus</i>, which is calculation and contrivance, and <i>ilinx</i>, which is a pure state of transport. ...
<!--
The desire to overcome an obstacle can only emerge to combat vertigo and prevent it from becoming transformed into disorder or panic. It is, therefore, training in self-control, an arduous effort to preserve calm and equilibrium. Far from being compatible with <i>ilinx</i>, it provides the discipline needed to neutralize the dangerous effects of <i>ilinx</i>, as in mountain climbing or tightrope walking.
-->
<p align=justify>
<br>
<i>Ludus</i>, in itself, seems incomplete, a kind of makeshift device intended to allay boredom. One becomes resigned to it while awaiting something preferable, such as the arrival of partners that makes possible the substitution of a contest for this solitary pleasure. ...
<!--
Moreover, even in games of skill or contrivance (e.g. patience, crossword and other puzzles) which exclude or regard as undesirable the intervention of another person, <i>ludus</i> no less inspires in the player the hope of succeeding the next time when he may obtain a higher score. In this way, the influence of <i>agôn</i> is again manifested. Indeed, it enriches the pleasure derived from overcoming an arbitrarily chosen obstacle. In fact, even if each of these games is played alone and is not replaced by an openly competitive one, it can easily and quickly be converted into a contest, with or without prizes, such as newspapers organize on occasion.
-->
<p align=justify>
There is also an aspect of <i>ludus</i> that, in my opinion, is explained by the presence of <i>agôn</i> within it: that is, that
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
it is strongly affected by fashion
</mark>
. The yo-yo, cup-and-ball, diabolo,
<p align=justify>
[32]
<p align=justify>
and ring puzzle appear and disappear as if by magic and soon are replaced by other games. In parallel fashion, the vogues for amusements of a more intellectual nature are no less limited in time;...
<!--
e.g. the rebus, the anagram, the acrostic, and the charade have had their hours.
-->
It is probable that crossword puzzles and detective stories will run the same course. Such a phenomenon would be enigmatic if <i>ludus</i> were an individual amusement, as seems superficially to be the case. ...
<!--
In reality, it is permeated with an atmosphere of competition. It only persists to the degree that the fervor of addicts transforms it into virtual <i>agôn</i>. When the latter is missing, <i>ludus</i> cannot persist independently. In fact, it is not sufficiently supported by the spirit of organized competition, which is not essential to it, and does not provide the substance for a spectacle capable of attracting crowds. It remains transient and diffuse, or else it risks turning into an obsession for the isolated fanatic who would dedicate himself to it absolutely and in his addiction would increasingly withdraw from society.
-->
<p align=justify>
Industrial civilization has given birth to a special form of <i>ludus</i>, the hobby, a secondary and gratuitous activity, undertaken and pursued for pleasure, e.g. collecting, unique accomplishments, the pleasure in billiards or inventing gadgets, in a word
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
any occupation that is primarily a compensation for the injury to personality caused by bondage to work of an automatic and picayune character.
</mark>
It has been observed that the hobby of the worker-turned-artisan readily takes the form of constructing <i>complete</i> scale models of the machines in the fabrication of which he is fated to cooperate by always repeating the same movement, an operation demanding no skill or intelligence on his part. He not only avenges himself upon reality, but in a positive and creative way. The hobby is a response to one of the highest functions of the play instinct. It is not surprising that a technical civilization contributes to its development, even to providing compensations for its more brutal aspects. Hobbies reflect the rare qualities that make their development possible.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
As always, the thesis of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
compensation
</mark>
seems incomplete at best. It seems a good candidate for a McLuhanish outflanking.
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Then again, here I am
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
constructing
</mark>
a
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
<i>complete</i> scale model
</mark>
of <i>Man, Play and Games</i> in my nonwork hours.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
In a general way, <i>ludus</i> relates to the primitive desire to find
<p align=justify>
[33]
<p align=justify>
diversion and amusement in arbitrary, perpetually recurrent obstacles. Thousands of occasions and devices are invented to satisfy simultaneously the desire for relaxation and the need, of which man cannot be rid, to utilize purposefully the knowledge, experience, and intelligence at his disposal, while disregarding self-control and his capacity for resistance to suffering, fatigue, panic, or intoxication.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
The funny thing is, there were
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
perpetually recurrent obstacles
</mark>
long before there was
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
industrial civilization
</mark>
. It is leisure time, a byproduct of industrialization rather than an essential ingredient in it (perhaps a seed of its own destruction, actually), that has heightened the importance of play and games. Some people had leisure time before industrialization, and some people didn't have any at the height of it. I would think <i>mass</i> gaming promises to differ a bit from its predecessors, especially in its social aspects.
</p>
<blockquote>
<br>
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
What I call <i>ludus</i> stands for the specific element in play the impact and cultural creativity of which seems most impressive. It does not connote a psychological attitude as precise as that of <i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i> or <i>ilinx</i>, but in disciplining the <i>paidia</i>, its general contribution is to give the fundamental categories of play their purity and excellence.
<br><br><br>
Besides, <i>ludus</i> is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of <i>paidia</i>. A civilization like that of classical China worked out a different destiny for itself. Wisely and circumspectly, Chinese culture is less directed toward purposive innovation. The need for progress and the spirit of enterprise generally seem to them a kind of compulsion that is not particularly creative. Under these conditions the turbulence and surplus of energy characteristic of <i>paidia</i> is channelized in a direction better suited to its supreme values. This is the place to return to the term <i>wan</i>. According to some, it would etymologically designate the act of indefinitely
caressing a piece of jade while polishing it, in order to savor its smoothness or as an accompaniment to reverie. Perhaps this origin clarifies another purpose of <i>paidia</i>. The reservoir of free movement that is part of its original definition seems in this case to be oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties but toward calm, patience, and idle speculation. The term <i>wan</i> basically designates all kinds of semiautomatic activities which leave the mind detached and idle, certain complex games which are part of <i>ludus</i>, and at the same time, nonchalant
meditation and lazy contemplation.
<br><br>
Tumult and din are covered by the expression <i>jeou-nao</i>, which
<br><br>
[34]
<br><br>
means literally "passion-disorder." When joined to the term <i>nao</i>, the term <i>wan</i> connotes any exuberant or joyous behavior. But this term <i>wan</i> must be present. With the character <i>tchouang</i> (to pretend), it means "to find pleasure in simulating." Thus <i>wan</i> coincides fairly exactly with the various possible manifestations of <i>paidia</i>, although when used alone it may designate a particular kind of game. It is not used for competition, dice, or dramatic interpretation. That is to say, it excludes the various kinds of games that I have referred to as institutional.
<br><br>
The latter are designated by more specialized terms. The character <i>hsi</i> corresponds to games of disguise or simulation, covering the domain of the theater and the spectacle. The character <i>choua</i> refers to games involving skill and ability; however, it is also used for contests involving jokes or puns, for fencing, and for perfection in practicing a difficult art. The character <i>teou</i> refers to conflict as such, cock fighting or dueling. It is also used for card games. Lastly, the character <i>tou</i>, not to be applied to children's games, covers games of chance, feats of daring, bets, and ordeals. It also is the name for blasphemy, for to tempt chance is considered a sacrilegious wager against destiny.
<br><br>
The vast semantic area of the term <i>wan</i> makes it even more deserving of interest. To begin with, it includes child's play and all kinds of carefree and frivolous diversion such as are suggested by the verbs to frolic, to romp, to trifle, etc. It is used to describe casual, abnormal, or strange sex practices. At the same time, it is used for games demanding reflection and forbidding haste, such as chess, checkers, puzzles (<i>tai Kiao</i>), and the game of nine rings. It also comprises the pleasure of appreciating the savor of good food or the bouquet of a wine, the taste for collecting works of art or even appreciating them, voluptuously handling and even fashioning delicate curios, comparable to the Occidental category of the hobby, collecting or puttering. Lastly, the transitory and relaxing sweetness of moonlight is suggested, the pleasure of a boat ride on a limpid lake or the prolonged contemplation of a waterfall.
<br><br>
[35]
<br><br>
The example of the word <i>wan</i> shows that the destinies of cultures can be read in their games. The preference for <i>agôn</i>, <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i>, or <i>ilinx</i> helps decide the future of a civilization, Also, the channeling of the free energy in <i>paidia</i> toward invention or contemplation manifests an implicit but fundamental and most significant choice.
-->
</p>
</blockquote>
<br><br><br><br><br>
<hr>
<blockquote>
[36]
<h4>
<center>
Table I. Classification of Games
</center>
</h4>
<br><br><br>
<br><br><br>
<br><br><br>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
[37]
<p style="text-align: right">
<font size=2>
CHAPTER III
</font>
</p>
<h3>
<center>
<i>
The Social Function of Games
</i>
</center>
</h3>
<p align=justify>
<br><br><br>
Play is not merely an individual pastime. It may not even be that as frequently as is supposed. To be sure, there are a number of games, notably games of skill, in which an entirely personal ability is displayed and which should not occasion surprise when played alone. However, games of skill may quickly become games of competitive skill. ...
<!--
There is an obvious proof of this. As individualized as one imagines the operation of the contraption to be—whether kite, top, yo-yo, diabolo, cup-and-ball, or hoop—it would quickly lose its capacity to amuse if there were no competitors or spectators, at least potentially. There is an element of rivalry in these varied activities, and everyone tries to vanquish his rivals, perhaps invisible or absent, by accomplishing unpublicized feats, triumphing over obstacles, establishing precarious records for endurance, speed, precision, and altitude—in a word, even though alone, reaping glory from a performance difficult to equal. Generally, the owner of a top hardly finds pleasure in the presence of curling fans, nor does the lover of kite-flying,
-->
<p align=justify>
[38]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
in a group occupied with rolling hoops. Possessors of the same toys congregate in an accustomed or convenient place where they test their skill. This is often essential to their pleasure.
-->
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
The competitive drive does not remain implicit or spontaneous for long. It leads to the establishment of rules by common agreement. Regulated kite-flying contests take place in Switzerland, The kite that flies highest is proclaimed the victor. In the Orient, the contest takes on the characteristic appearance of a tournament. For a certain distance from the kite the string is coated with grease to which sharp-edged pieces of glass are attached. The object is to skillfully cut the strings of the other kite fliers. This keen competition is the result of a pastime that in principle does not seem to be so adapted.
-->
<p align=justify>
<!--
Another striking example of the transition from solitary pastime to competitive and even spectacular pleasure is provided by
-->
...the game of cup-and-ball. An Eskimo is disguised as a very schematic representation of an animal, bear, or fish. He is stabbed many times. The player must use his weapon in a predetermined order, holding the knife properly. Then he begins the series again, his knife held inside his index finger, then emerging from behind his elbow, next pressed between his teeth, while the thrust of the weapon describes even more complicated figures. If he misses, the awkward player must pass the weapon to a rival. The latter goes through the same motions, trying to catch up or take the lead. While stabbing and withdrawing, the player simulates an adventure or analyzes an action. He tells the story of a journey, a hunt, or a combat, enumerating various phases of the dismemberment of his prey, an operation that is a female monopoly.
...
<!--
At each new hole, he triumphantly announces:
<blockquote>
She grips her knife
<br>
Cuts open the seal
<br>
Removes the skin
<br>
Removes the intestines
<br>
Opens the chest
<br>
Removes the entrails
<br>
Removes the ribs
</blockquote>
-->
<p align=justify>
[39]
<p align=justify>
...
<!--
<blockquote>
Removes the vertebral column
<br>
Removes the pelvis
<br>
Removes the hind quarters
<br>
Removes the head
<br>
Removes the fat
<br>
Folds the skin in half
<br>
Soaks it in urine
<br>
Dries it in the sun . . .
</blockquote>
Sometimes the player substitutes his rival and imagines that he is cutting him to pieces:
<blockquote>
I beat you
<br>
I kill you
<br>
I cut off your head
<br>
I cut off your arm
<br>
And then the other
<br>
I cut off your leg
<br>
And then the other
<br>
The pieces for the dogs
<br>
The dogs eat . . .
</blockquote>
Not only dogs, but foxes, crows, crabs, and anything that comes to mind. His rival, before entering combat, must first reassemble his body in inverse order of its mutilation. This idyllic pursuit is punctuated by clamoring for assistance from the audience, which has passionately been following the episodes in the duel.
-->
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
At this stage, the game of skill is obviously a cultural phenomenon,
</mark>
an aid to communion and collective recreation in the cold and long darkness of the Arctic night. This extreme case is no exception. However, it has the advantage of suggesting at what point games that are among the most personal in nature or intent lend themselves, in certain circumstances, to
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
developments and refinements that bring them close to institutionalization.
</mark>
It would seem that play
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
lacks something
</mark>
when it is reduced to a mere
<mark style="background-color: green; color: lightgrey">
solitary exercise.
</mark>
<p align=justify>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Games generally attain their goal only when they stimulate an echo of complicity.
</mark>
Even when the player could in principle conveniently play alone, games quickly become a pretext for a
<p align=justify>
[40]
<p align=justify>
contest or an exhibition,...
<!--
as has been observed in kite-flying or cup-and-ball.
-->
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
Most of them indeed seem to reflect stimulus and response
</mark>,
thrust and parry, provocation and contagion, and effervescence or shared tension.
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
They need an attentive and sympathetic audience.
</mark>
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
It is unlikely that any category of play would be an exception to this law.
</mark>
Even games of chance seem to be more of an attraction in a group, if not in a crowd. ...
<!--
Nothing prevents the players from placing their bets by telephone or risking their money in comfort either at home or in a discreet salon. But they would rather be pressed by the throng which fills the hippodrome or casino, for the pleasure, thrill, and excitement engendered by fraternization with an anonymous multitude.
-->
<p align=justify>
It is also painful to find oneself alone at a spectacle, even at the movies, despite the absence of living actors who would sufter from lack of an audience. It is also clear that one is disguised or masked for the sake of others. Finally, games of vertigo are in the same category—swinging, horseback riding, and tobogganing demand an effervescence and collective passion to sustain and encourage the intoxication that they produce.
<p align=justify>
Therefore, the different categories of play—<i>agôn</i> (by definition), <i>alea</i>, <i>mimicry</i>, and <i>ilinx</i>—
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
presuppose not solitude but company.
</mark>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Hardly a contradiction of Lasch's riff on the "unobserved" quality of "superior performance." Rather it is a confirmation: the <i>average</i> performance has the quality of being <i>observed</i>, whether or not it is attempted <i>only</i> to be observed; but the superior performer <i>seems</i> to be playing alone, even if they are unlikely to think so even to themselves.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Moreover, a necessarily restricted circle is most often required.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
And note just how profoundly this thesis of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
restriction
</mark>
mediates the thesis of
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
presuppose</mark>d
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
company
</mark>
.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
Each plays in his turn, as he desires and as required by the rules, so that the number of players could not be multiplied indefinitely without reducing the frequency of individual play. A game permits only a limited number of participants. ...
<!--
Thus a game readily seems like a pursuit for small groups of initiates or <i>aficionados</i>, who momentarily surrender to their favorite
pastime. In addition, the mass of spectators favors mimicry, just as collective turbulence stimulates, and is in turn stimulated by, <i>ilinx</i>.
-->
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Yet the mass spectatorship
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
permitt</mark>ed
by present technology is functionally limitless. This makes the
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
restricted circle
</mark>
especially indispensible for anyone who wants to <i>really play</i> rather than <i>just</i> ("merely") <i>play</i>. But the technology was made this way for a reason, and that reason has more powerful backers than your little game ever will.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p align=justify>
<br>
Under certain conditions, even the games intended by their very nature to be played by a limited number of players exceed the limit. They reflect forms which, while doubtless remaining in the domain of play, evolve a bureaucracy, a complex ap-
<p align=justify>
[41]
<p align=justify>
paratus, and a specialized, hierarchical personality. In a word, they sustain permanent and refined structures, institutions of an official, private, marginal, and sometimes clandestine character, whose status seems nonetheless remarkably assured and durable.
</blockquote>
<p style="margin-right: 30%">
Except of course to everyone who is not part of it. But no doubt they have their own. The possibility for such
<mark style="background-color: lightgrey; color: green">
institutions
</mark>
to coexist in a way that, say, religions or political philosophies cannot, this must be counted among the happier aspects of the condition chronicled, e.g., by MacCannell. But, per Becker and followers, few of us seem content to leave well enough alone in this particular area.
</p>
<blockquote>
...
<!--
Each of the basic categories of play has socialized aspects of this sort and has become socially legitimate because of its prevalence and stability. For <i>agôn</i>, the socialized form is essentially sports, to which are added contests in which skill and chance are subtly blended as in games and contests on radio and as part of advertising. In <i>alea</i>, there are casinos, racetracks, state lotteries, and pari-mutuels. For <i>mimicry</i>, the arts involved are public spectacles, puppet shows, the Grand Guignol, and much more
equivocally, carnivals and masked balls which are already oriented toward vertigo. Finally, <i>ilinx</i> is revealed in the traveling show and the annual or cyclical occasions for popular merrymaking and jollity.
<br><br>
A whole chapter of this study of games is devoted to examining the means by which games become part of daily life. Indeed, these manifestations contribute to the development in various cultures of their most characteristic customs and institutions.
-->
</blockquote>
<br><br>
<!--
<hr><hr>
<h5>
***lasch's "quality of being unobserved"***
<br>
http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-degradation-of-sport.html
<br>
combine with comment to (iv)
</h5>
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
<i>Man, Play and Games</i>
(1961)
section heading: "The Social Function of Games"
<i>"Play is not merely an individual pastime. It may not even be that as frequently as is supposed. ...games of skill may quickly become games of competitive skill."</i>
(p. 37)
<i>"It would seem that play lacks something when it is reduced to a mere solitary exercise.
"Games generally attain their goal only when they stimulate an echo of complicity."</i>
(p. 39)
<i>"Most of them indeed seem to reflect stimulus and response thrust and parry, provocation and contagion, and effervescence or shared tension. They need an attentive and sympathetic audience. It is unlikely that any category of play would be an exception to this law. Even games of chance seem to be more of an attraction in a group, if not in a crowd. ...
"It is also painful to find oneself alone at a spectacle, even at the movies, despite the absence of living actors who would suffer from lack of an audience."</i>
(p. 40)
(<a href="https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2023/07/cailloismpg-ii.html">more</a>)
-->
Stefan Kachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03103517356905739209noreply@blogger.com0