Rank—Art and Artist (iv)—Dynamic Needs of Equalization

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

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[xlviii] a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature's moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out...that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent , which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination , whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form...is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary

[xlix]

re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.

[end of Introduction]

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I

Rank's

feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism

of individual and collective. (p. xxii)

By therefore relegating

biography (or pathography)

to the margins, Rank reestablishes a line (perhaps a barrier) between transmission and reception, a line that uncritical, self-projecting observers have tended to blur.

I see no reason why the audience cannot also be creating something through their participation, incommensurable as that something may be with what the artist has presented to them. Yes, reception can be a (self-)generative act, a transformative act, or at the very least an act of consolidation, a renewing of vows to ego and/or to alter. Audiences must also have some dynamic need of equalization even if that need is not as tempestuous as that of the artist-type . But I also see no reason why we should be obligated to assume this of the audience tout court. The old saw about actions speaking louder than words is never too obvious or trite to be relevant. Experience permits us to be dubious when someone tells us offhandedly that a song or a movie or an unrealized concept piece "changed my life." Don't tell me, show me. Don't write your own biography so mechanistically. The fact that you yourself have done it does not make it valid.

Lasch—To Establish or Submerge?

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

p. 6—my note says:
contrasts the "consciousness movement" with past "millenarian outbreaks"; specifically, in living "only for the moment" and not for some future utopia

[8] Her preoccupation with the state of her psychic health, together with her dependence on others for a sense of selfhood, distinguish Susan Stern [in her memoir of the Weathermen] from the kind of religious seeker who turns to politics to find a secularized salvation. She needed to establish an identity, not to submerge her identity in a larger cause.

A linchpin of the broader narcissism thesis. Certainly it is observable in many areas of life whether or not narcissism per se is involved. The choice of a sixties activist as an illustration is, nonetheless, probably not an innocent/unmotivated choice and probably doesn't do justice to the earnest beliefs of a great many involved in those movements. Another case, I think, of visibility and representativeness being conflated. A more mundane, representative example could be made of the vast majority of eighteen year-olds who show up to college declaring a major in the performing arts, only to eventually graduate or (statistically much more likely) quit having established much but submerged little.

[10] For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

...

[15] [Jerry] Rubin claims that the "inner revolution of the seventies" grew out of an awareness that the radicalism of the sixties had failed to address itself to the quality of personal life or to cultural questions, in the mistaken belief that questions of "personal growth," in his words, could wait "until after the revolution." This accusation contains a certain amount of truth. ...

Yep. Anytime you're told something indispensible can wait, expect the wait to be interminable.

[16] Yet...in those years, there was a growing recognition [by the New Left and others]...that personal crisis on the scale it has now assumed represents a political issue in its own right, and that a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish...

Yep.

Also from a note:
pp. 25-27—against understanding "contemporary narcissism" as classbound

[26] The collapse of personal life originates not in the spiritual torments of affluence but in the war of all against all...

...

[27] the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place

now being advocated as solutions.

The Sneakernet of Everyday Life

A couple of years after college I commenced sporadic production of a half-humorous zine as an outlet for various petty frustrations with the world of music and musicians. The focus was more personal and quotidian than on this blog, which I started around the same time. Blogging being public and more or less permanent, I have always maintained that the more personal the content the more interesting and unique it ought to be. Ditto regarding any imperative towards expression as that word is broadly and colloquially construed across The Arts. Seems to me that any such imperative is necessarily colored by several more general features of the society or social group in question, e.g. the degree of shared experience, conformity to norms, obedience to authority, and so on. In other words, most of us are not quite different enough from each other for the public airing of even the most intimate details to be the least bit interesting to our various constituencies. (And if a public airing is to be deemed necessary on purely therapeutic grounds, then the offending malaise must be a particularly virulent and contagious one indeed; on which point I must thereby beg your indulgence in suspending judgment of this meta-airing until its purpose has become clear.)

In any case, as the blog has skewed speculative, the zine has become an archive of the personal, and this dovetailed with the fact of the latter's strictly private and offline circulation. I have recently resumed production after a long hiatus and am finding it quite useful in exactly this way. The reason, however, for writing at length on all of this now is to relate a very practical use, perhaps even a necessary one, which has recently emerged and which never would have occurred to me the day I brought out the first installment.

Employers are demanding to moderate what their employees say about them online, and not even a jazz tuba player can avoid falling under surveillance. This was ostensibly the case with a certain car opera recently staged in and around LA by a company you probably haven't heard of, and it is ostensibly the case regarding my current employment with an entertainment franchise you’ve most certainly heard of. Neither of the organizations in question will ever be mentioned by name here, not by me at least, and not by you either if you happen to know me well enough to put all of this together and would like me to be able to address any new developments to the already limited extent possible under the circumstances. They will not be mentioned because as a condition of employment both demand authority to moderate online content pertaining to them, and because one is known to devote significant resources to this. (And really, what quantity of resources is not "significant" when you consider the implications of such policies and the time-is-money realities of running a business?)

For what it’s worth, I don’t have to start a limited-run, privately-circulated, dead-tree social commentary franchise with which to digest, explore, archive and (usually) exorcise the vicissitudes of such personal experience: I already have one as an existential matter if not much of a material one. What I didn’t have before was real necessity for such an outlet ("real" in this case meaning "beyond the personal")¹. Thanks to the new thought police, which, like so many other rhetorical constructions of modernist dystopian thought, has coalesced fragmentarily and incrementally rather than all at once, now I do.

For anyone just devoted enough to my personal concerns to be an earnest and comprehensive reader of both publications, it might be useful to think of the zine as a sort of annotated bibliography in support of the more sweeping generalizations I make here about the professional circles I inhabit, and perhaps also as a way of “blogging” on topics and experiences which would be socially ungraceful and/or professionally damaging to address publicly online. I suppose this betrays my rather cynical view of prevailing norms of social and professional comportment, but unfortunately there is almost always something arising from artists' relationships with employers and/or with each other which really ought to be addressed and brought to wider attention, i.e. for the specific purpose of giving the community a chance to look itself in the mirror. Social grace and professional viability are quite flimsy excuses for forgoing such opportunities: first, because together they amount to very little when compared to the potential chilling effect of the new reality; and second, because, as I am attempting to outline here, it is not impossible to have it both ways given the variety of media and social settings presently at our collective disposal. In any case, there won't be much worldly grace or prestige left to preserve if transparency is ritually sacrificed to branding in this arena as it already has been in so many others. Unfortunately the seemingly ideal online platforms which emerged in the 1990s are in the 2010s now equally ideal for surveillance. Hence the ongoing need for a Sneakernet of Everyday Life.


1. Again, is “personal” necessity ever better than oxymoronic vis-a-vis the act of telling others about yourself? And does the therapeutic value of artistic "expression" really hinge on the act of public presentation over and beyond private creation? Even if the answer is simply, "It depends," these two questions are always worth pondering before hitting the Send button. Ask me how I know.