Rank—Art and Artist (vi)—Life and Creation

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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[37]

Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

...

[38]

...the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist,...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.
...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. ...lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...

[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. ...

...besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man;...[there is also to be reckoned with] the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. ...

[40] If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
[41]
will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...

And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. ...

Give Me Back My Music, You Damn Romantic

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

p. 106—music as the highest Romantic art; and Romanticism as the Dionysian opposite of classicism

Both taxonomies are trite, but I'd never considered them together, which places music precisely where polite Bourgie non-culture places it: unclaimed, mercurial, ultimately not to be trusted. As just one half of a dialectical pair (Apollonian-Dionysian), music is also incomplete, in need of grounding.

Incidentally, it is hard not to notice the complete absence of musicians in the SI and subsequent accounts of it, as well as similarly scant mention of music in SI theoretical statements. I suspect this has nothing to do with its Dionysian nature and much more to do with the Apollonian side of music's internal technical dynamics which the established mythology has reduced away.

Added Later: music CAN be just about perfectly balanced in the Ap.-Dion. respect. If anyone cares to pursue this. Probably true of all the arts. So, music pre- and post-dates Romanticism, but the Romantics get to claim it for their ends, and no one else's. Not productive! Music could, via a one-sided account, be posited as the ultimate Romantic art; but Romantics were hardly the ultimate musicians. In fact the opposite, strictly IMHO.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[the passage:]

The classical assumes a legitimate order, revealed by the light of the sun. God's in his heaven, the king's on his throne, all is right with the world. And what goes wrong can be rectified. Like Le Corbusier's plans, classicism favors the right angle and the straight line. It favors the form of the myth, in which order is destabilized, restored, legitimated. Its privileged medium is architecture. Its method is imitation. Everyone imitates the one above them in the social order, just as the king imitates God, and the whole social order imitates nature. Classical humor, from Molière to Sacha Baron-Cohen, ridicules failed attempts at imitation. In Molière's satirical attack on the Precious movement, provincial ladies shun some nobleman as beneath them, so these retaliate by having their grooms pretend to be Precious sophisticates. Hilarity ensues, but classical humor serves order.

The romantic is a corrosive fluid that attacks the classical on every front. It is a refusal of obedience. It lurks in the dark, in the mist, within the eclipse. Time is out of joint. It favors the wave, the vibration, the curlicue. It mixes forms, detaches symbols from myths, and puts them in play against all that is legitimate. Its medium of greatest affinity is music. Its method is creation, which it claims as a human potential, not a divine attribute. For Lefebvre the romantic intersects with a certain strand of irony. Unlike Jorn he idolizes the achievements of the Greeks, not least Socratic irony, which is the undoing of any order of belief. The subjective irony of Socrates anticipates the objective irony of history, which sweeps order away in its aleatory currents.