...that the development of art historically has its parallel in the development of the individual, and that human infants exhibit, without embarrassment, many characteristics we find most marked [25] in the artist--above all a certain innocent self-love, which makes him regard his own productions as precious and worthy of attention. Without that fundamental vanity, man might never have had sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism to transform them into works of art--works taking stable form under and exacting discipline, and so capable of influencing the feelings and conduct of other men. (24-25)
Here is the old saw, artists as infantile. We find certain infantile traits "most marked" in the artist; they are noticeable, then, but are they determinative? Essential?
Whatever LM means precisely by "innocent self-love," whatever is "fundamental" about his notion of the infant-artist's "fundamental vanity," one can certainly confirm the resemblance anecdotally, and perhaps copiously in certain milieux (e.g. art school). I would, however, caution against defining artisthood this way; that is, to move from correlation to causation, as many in the post-Freudian continuum did. Creativity is one of those traits of children that lead armchair psychologists to trumpet the value of staying young at heart; but for every one of these traits there are a handful of others which are handicaps to artists much the same as they are to any other adult. I cannot help but think here of the popular, movie-made image of Mozart as against that of Bach, Beethoven or Brahms, or dozens of other Grown Ass Men and Women whose art has outlived them. Perhaps, then, it would be better to say that the arts are a sector where it is easier get away with not growing up, especially if you're talented (true of most fields), or even if you're not (I think this is the biggest difference).
By locating "sufficient respect for the materials of symbolism" as arising only from the artist's vanity, LM makes out "stable form" and "exacting discipline" to be quite the chores. By this account, a socially maladaptive/pathological trait (infantilism) is in fact well-adapted to and defined as normal within the world of art. The mind of the artist, this child's mind in an adult's body, could never find "discipline" rewarding in and of itself, but if discipline is what it takes to sate the artist's vanity, then it is a means to an end which will be milked for all its worth. I have known and worked with several people like this, generally for short periods of time.
Of course no sooner has the infant-artist axis been established than LM reveals a schema for an artistic maturation process (a deep-psychological one, in contrast to the merely behavioristic observations which precede). In the highest stage the artist "lose[s] himself in [the] act" of creation, which has become all about "begetting fresh forms of life," the work becoming "itself an independent force", etc. This all sounds lovely, but it's not clear (nor is it ever really addressed) that there is any real correlation between good intentions, good artists, and good art. I would question whether creation and reception have ever been well-integrated enough to bear the weight of the prescriptions he issues for them here. For LM it is the second of three stages, the "adolescent," during which "exhibitionism passes into communication." To the contrary, I would argue that "communication" per se is essentially a branch of technics, not art. To speak of communication rather than something more vague or euphemistic, to speak of symbols rather than signals, is precisely to hone in on "that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded." Communication is the technical end to which language is merely the most capable and nuanced means; art is also nuanced but not nearly so capable. To define art and artisthood as literally communicative points, ironically, toward the fully-rationalized world LM writes against. This is art-ontological technics run amok, elevating a more technical, tractable function over fuzzier ones, and conflating concreteness of expression with maturity of purpose.
7 comments:
Richard Sennett
The Fall of Public Man
(1977)
"The immense literature on play tends to fall in two schools. One treats play as a form of cognitive activity; it examines how children form symbols through their play and how these symbols become more complex as children at play grow older. The other school treats play as behavior, is less concerned with symbol formation, and concentrates on how children learn cooperation, express aggression, and tolerate frustration through playing together.
"Those in the cognitive camp have occasionally shown an interest in the relationship of play to creative work, but these forays have suffered on two accounts. One is that many writers have identified play and "the creative act" as virtually synonymous; the strict adherents of Freud have done so in imitation of such sentiments as the following from their master:
The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously, that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion, while separating it sharply from reality. . . .
—a dictum which led Freud to the conclusion that
The opposite of play is not what is serious but what it real.
Those whose studies of play have led them question this Freudian opposition of play-creativity to reality often phrase their arguments in equal if opposite terms. Play and creativity are spoken of as "at work in reality, not on it," as a process of drawing logical connections which cannot be drawn by the particular processes of deductive logic, and so forth. But the play and creativity are spoken of interchangeably still. Thus it becomes difficult to distinguish the specific qualitative differences between a child who, banging on the black keys of the piano, suddenly discovers they form a pentatonic scale, and Debussy, who, one summer doing finger exercises, discovers possibilities in the pentatonic scale none of his contemporaries had before imagined. To say the two activities are similar in kind easily meshes into saying they are "fundamentally" the same, and then an essential quality in each realm becomes obscured: judgment. If Debussy is "fundamentally" playing around the same way as a child, the quality of his judgment about his experiments with the pentatonic scale is obliterated; "any child could do it." But the point is, no child could."
(p. 316)
William Stephenson
The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)
"Pope wrote with no thought of hurt or gain...he was having fun, as a child has when it plays. If we are so minded, and so open to joy, reading the poem gives us the selfsame satisfactions. And this is the core of our theory."
(pp. 199-200)
More:
http://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/10/stephenson-ptmcwork-and-play-and-work.html
Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991)
[91]
"For the Romantic poets in general, innocence was "valuable for what it might become," as Peter Coveney aptly puts it. With the Victorians, however, the emphasis shifted "toward the state of innocence itself, not as a resilient expression of man's potential integrity, but as something statically juxtaposed to experience, and not so much static as actually in retreat.
"This retreat found its definitive symbol in the deathbed scene, increasingly obligatory in novels aspiring to any sort of popularity, in which a child neglected, oppressed, or shamefully deserted by those who should have served as its protectors expires without a word of reproach—itself the ultimate reproach... In the world of Victorian and post-Victorian melodrama, innocence had only one role: to die as heartrendingly as possible. ...
[92]
...it was Marie Corelli, in The Mighty Atom (1896), who most fully revealed its significance when she asked "whether for many a child it would not have been happiest never to have grown up at all." She advised her readers not to "grieve for the fair legions of beloved children who have passed away in their childhood," since "we know, even without the aid of Gospel comfort, that it is 'far better' with them so." The idea that children are better off dead casts an unexpectedly lurid light on the nineteenth-century cult of childhood, which held children up to adoration but denied them any compellingly imagined possibility of development, in which early experience would continue to inform adult perceptions. An impoverished view of adulthood, this ostensibly sympathetic view of childhood also falsified the very thing it purported to celebrate, attributing to children Peter Pan's wish "always to be a boy and have fun," a wish that only jaded, embittered adults could have conceived."
Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type
(1965)
For Randolph Bourne,
"The key to politics was the process of aging. The root of social disorder was seen not as oppression but repression: the destruction of freedom and spontaneity which was necessary to make children into adults. It was at this point that Bourne's analysis coincided with John Dewey's, Jane Addams's, and the progressive educators in general. It also ran parallel, for a while, to Sigmund Freud's, although how closely Bourne knew Freud's work, if he knew it at all first hand, is not clear. The very fact that the point should be in doubt suggests what is indeed amply confirmed by other evidence, that the concept of the child as a different order of being from the adult—and in some respects a superior order of being—did not owe its existence to Freud. It was rather the general intellectual property of the age."
(pp. 85-86)
(more)
Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)
"This was a guerilla war against the bourgeois class and its hegemony, its representatives in the ateliers, its Renaissance traditions, and its Greek and Roman heritage. The great talents in a sense refused to be adults and citizens; they allied themselves to children, to primitives, to madmen, and against the dominant gender, race, and class. They denied reality via their denial of realism."
(p. 38)
(more)
Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
(1962)
"What is a picture?"
(pp. 182-190)
[187] "Such pure gesture sophisticatedly recalls the painting of children or aboriginal petroglyphs in what fascinates us is not the painted product but the transmitted action, the sense of the painter painting."
Frederick Crews
Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
(1975)
[173]
"it would not be altogether perverse to suggest that ego psychology makes the problem of reductionism harder to recognize and address. The very sophistication of recent doctrine may allow its spokesman to forget what Freud usually remembered, that the secret of artistic genius is beyond his science. A theory like Ernst Kris's, which depicts creativity as playfully controlled regression, comes just near enough to accommodating artistic freedom to convince the critic that he can put reductionism behind him and deal with art in all its fullness. In actuality he is still bound to a largely passive and defensive conception of mind—one that omits or minimizes exactly that drive toward perfection of form that distinguishes the artist from the ordinary neurotic."
Post a Comment