Rank—Art and Artist (i)The Autonomy of the Spiritual

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

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiii] the human urge to create does not find expression in works of art alone; it also produces religion and mythology and the social institutions corresponding to these. In a word, it produces the whole culture of which the works of art in a particular style-epoch have to be regarded as one of the expression-forms. We shall therefore avoid, as far as may be, the attempt to "explain" completely any one of these expression-forms in terms of another one, and shall rather consider all the expression-forms of human culture, however various, first in relation to their origins in the creative impulse, and thereafter in respect of their reciprocal action.

Here is one good reason to treat The Arts as a unit: despite their technical diversity, they share a common psychological origin in the human urge to create .

In the direction of transmission this is origin marks a point of "divergence" beyond which discipline-specific factors are operable.

In the direction of reception it is a point of "convergence" beyond which diverse artworks (and who knows what other cultural artifacts; e.g. religion , mythology , social institutions ) can be grouped together.

[xv] even though the various human civilizations may each arise from the combination of a certain environment and a certain type of humanity, all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul. By this we mean, not to say that the soul can be wholly explained in terms of modern psychology, as our mechanistic science would claim, but, on the contrary, to stress the autonomy of the spiritual, which not only works creatively in the religious, artistic, and social realms, but also determines the ideology which colours the psychology of the time.

This assertion of the autonomy of the spiritual is an effort to reestablish the dynamic quality of the art-ideology nexus; this against all manner of static, mechanistic accounts which posit one dominant epiphenomenon (or maybe two, but rarely more).

Adherents of static accounts are bound to find such "autonomy" merely a smuggling-in of essentialism and/or absolutism ("all human problems..."). Yet in the conflict between individual and collective, Rank does seem to have found something broad enough to permit generalization. Whom among the Francophile outflankers would dare move the goalposts beyond even this fundamental conflict?

Further, the dominance or recession of some such epiphenomenon is, as Rank says below, itself a fact in need of explaining; and even then, being duly explained, it remains a mechanistic account destined to be confounded by the occasional dynamic anomaly. And art is all about the anomalies anyway.

Such a borderline investigation of the various domains that surround the human creative impulse and its manifold forms of expression [sic], it is therefore essential above all else to resist the temptation to accept any definite psychological theory as the principle of exegesis, remembering that the ruling psychological ideology itself appears to be as much in need of explanation as the other spiritual phenomena which it claims, either wholly or at least satisfactorily, to explain. For this satisfactory explanation, even if achieved, is often but a specious product resting on the ideological coincidence of the exegetical principle itself with the phenomenon to be explained.

Since the 1960s, the prevailing exegetical principle which is also the phenomenon to be explained has been the realization that Everything Is Political. I happen to agree with this statement as far as it goes, and I also think that it does not go all that far, i.e. in precisely the everything-and-nothing sense pointed to above.

If Everything Is Political, this does not mean that Politics is Everything, nor that we can understand anything (that is, Everything) which happens to be Political via a narrow focus on its Politics. There is little gained and much lost when we make meaning from art based on that which art shares with Everything Else. And because art shares this Political quality with Everything Else, art's Political qualities are not all that remarkable unless they are uniquely and specifically its own; in other words, if they arise from the autonomous features of art rather than the features which are determined by the ruling psychological ideology; if they belong to the divergence of psycho-origins rather than to their convergence.

As Rank surely understands, the same caveats apply even to so ultimately broad a question as the individual versus the collective, solutions to which also can be debased to the level of an ideology as easily as can those pesky politics-which-are-everything. To hold that some form of this conflict is endemic to the human condition is by no means to hold that all human conflicts can be explained by it.

To abstain from such mechanism and instead resolve to live with a certain irreducible uncertainty vis-a-vis the art problem , this requires a certain kind of temperament. It would be fair to conclude from copious anecdotal evidence that almost no one has it, least of all artists themselves. The psychological theory of it all is endlessly fascinating but ultimately superfluous, because there is no problem unless we have invented one (by way of the ideology du jour) for ourselves to solve.

The terrain is fraught. Questioning the need for certainty is itself just one more invitation to partake of the socio-determinist smorgasbord, to join in the sophistry of Taleb's economic forecasters who grant the flimsiness of a model while at once insisting that "It's the best we've got." This sophistry is cheap-to-free nowadays. The position taken here, even so, is that we cannot "afford" it.

A commitment to radical honesty in the face of endemic myth-making seems to put rationality ahead of grace, or perhaps merely to armor us against the world rather than entering into mediation with it. Really, we are the problem, not art. This point is given great emphasis and support by Rank's best-known recuperator, but there is plenty more to reckon with here. Artists cannot demand the luxury of an honest reception when, for example, any reception at all betokens that publicity-which-cannot-possibly-be-bad. It's a real problem, and also is itself a/the formidable emergent art-ideology of the epoch after Rank.

INTRODUCTION

...

p. xliv—does the artist not

take over the different art-forms, indeed, even to develop them, but also to break through, to overcome, these forms, to mix them with others, to supplant them by others?

The fact that this not only is possible, but does actually occur in the case of almost every great artist-personality, brings us back to our spiritual dualism and to the experience that at any rate the two tendencies—call them what one will—must be potentially present in the artist, even though both do not always find expression. ...even cool-eyed art-historians are forced in the end to some such conception of the transmu-

[xlv]

tation of the laws of style.

Indeed, also the laws of determination by individual psychology, cultural conditioning, and biography. The widely-observable transmutation of these too-parsimonious explanations is here taken to rule them out tout court, axiomatically. They explain neither what artworks are nor what artworks mean. Yet the sheer persistence with which these explanations are offered and reiterated indicates that the explanations themselves do mean something, beyond the mere fact of recapitulating the most obvious conclusions drawn from the most superficial inquiries.

The if-then theory of art-history is merely the most socially acceptable variety of what Sontag called "the revenge of the intellect upon art." (As always, intellect≠intelligence.) Revenge upon art, and indeed upon artist too, for how to more effectively cut the artist down to size, to literally reduce the artist's achievement, than to deploy reductionist interpretation of their work, to reduce it to only those collective elements in which everyone shares, or to only individual elements in which no one else can share, but without asking either of Rank's next, best questions:

what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean?

what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others?

As these questions suggest, Art History's house blend of socio-determinist reductionism is ultimately qualitative as well as quantitative. It turns equally on questions of meaning and characterics as on efforts to establish demonstrable social importance (or superfluity). It makes its way in disguise, not merely as something it is not but in fact the opposite of what it actually is: the demand for a full audit ends in a mere bottom-line declaration; the messy calculations are banished to the appendix. The one-sidedness of the conceit du jour is mirrored in one-sided analysis which can only ensure a narrowing of the field.

The ideology of genius thereby dies a death by a thousand cuts. It may deserve to die, but not without a proper burial. Failing this, its malign spirit has remained to haunt us.

Sontag:

"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.""

Rank:

the ruling psychological ideology itself appears to be as much in need of explanation as the other spiritual phenomena which it claims, either wholly or at least satisfactorily, to explain.

Neither the cultural and scientific history of art nor the aesthetic psychology of the artist has so far provided a satisfactory answer to this central question of the whole problem of art: namely, what constitutes the correlation between artist-type and the art-product; that is to say, the artistic creativeness and the art-form?

If this un-law of transmutation holds for all other faux-determinant factors as it does for style, then the taking of "revenge" is shorn of its rationale. This is quite the hopeful development for art and artist alike. But it is then to the same degree unfortunate that such liberating un-laws must in the same breath as they are issued also be qualified as applying only to great artists, as Rank does here (and he is not alone).

As ways of defining greatness go, transmutation of the laws of style is among the least bad. And if occasional lapses into if-then thinking remain inevitable even here, if we paradoxically end up reducing the artist even in exalting them, we are consoled by the notion that "punching up" at the great is at least excusable, whereas "punching down" at the weak cannot be. But then the weakest must take priority in the defense against injustice, and socio-determinist reductionism is, to whatever degree, an injustice. Genius can defend itself; others may need help. Both defenses are necessary in any case, and the angle of attack is the same. It is to inflate the artists while reduc-ing the selves, this rather than the obverse which criticism, the social sciences, and no small number of artists themselves have tended to converge upon.

[235] 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.

Similarly, Lewis Mumford:

One has only to compare the cave paintings of the Aurignacian hunters with the tools that they used to see that their technical instruments...were extremely primitive, while their symbolic arts were [quite] advanced...

Early man had created vast and wonderful symbolic structures in language at a time when a handful of tools sufficed to meet his needs in hunting and agriculture... If man were preeminently the tool-using animal, this long backwardness in technics would be hard to account for.

It's easy to imagine that such things as

fire

and

measurement of time

were simply destined to be become

tools,

so obvious has their tool-value since become.

There is even an academically permissible form of hindsight bias available to us, via a tortured deployment affordance and entrainment, should we wish to hold that these were tools all along. (We just took a while to get hip.)

A somewhat less tortured option is to notice that the above remarks, breezy as they are, establish a trajectory, a tendency for even artifacts of religious, supersensible, and ideological origin to end up, eventually, being instrumentalized, put to gainful use. Also that affordance and entrainment both are in the eye of the beholder; not that they should be, but that they are. The word "ingenuity" has both a literal and a sarcastic usage.

This would explain why even art-for-art's-sake eventually gets turned back into functional art. (Have you heard that classical music makes kids smart?) Similarly, all manner of literally- and figuratively-named magic wands have been called into service in the very gravest functional matters of social cohesion and group survival.

e.g.,

[199] This age-old custom, still practised...consisted in immuring living human beings—new-born children for choice—under the foundation-walls of new buildings. No clue is found to the origin of this custom... Rudolf Kleinpaul refuses to regard these built-in persons as "sacrifices" in the true sense, on the ground that there would not at that stage be any protecting demons and gods in the new building who would require victims; the intention, he holds, was to create spirits, to make a beginning. In the deeper sense of creative force these "house-spirits" may resonably be called victims, however, as they embody the idea that every created thing, if it is to be capable of life, owes its existence to some life destroyed. Whichever way one looks at it, the building-sacrifice affirms once more the dualistic nature of the problem of architecture, and, in principle, of all other art-creation. ...the custom further reveals the fact that the building is not intended as a mere copy (imitation) of natural processes, but represents a spiritual re-creation, and this is made possible by the death of the walled-in person, which sets free his spirit to animate the building.

To be crude about it, what matters here is not truth but belief. We might wish it otherwise given such grisly and senseless history as our wretched species has put on record. Alas, as Rank well shows, human beings can both survive and thrive without truth; whereas without belief we are, as Becker later puts it, "as good as dead."

A close-at-hand illustration which Rank would have appreciated:

[307] The social function of memory — and of forgetting — can thus be seen as the final stage of what may be called the homeostatic organisation of the cultural tradition in non-literate society. ... What continues to be social relevance is stored in the memory while the rest is usually

[308]

forgotten.

...

Like the Bedouin Arabs and the Hebrews of the Old Testament, the Tiv people of Nigeria give long genealogies of their forebears which in this case stretch some twelve generations in depth back to an eponymous founding ancestor. ...

[309] Early British administrators among the Tiv of Nigeria were aware of the great importance attached to these genealogies, which were continually discussed in court cases... Consequently they took the trouble to write down the long lists of names... Forty years later, when the Bohannans carried out anthropological field work in the area, their successors were still using the same genealogies. However, these written pedigrees now gave rise to many disagreements; the Tiv maintained that they were incorrect, while the officials regarded them as statements of fact,... What neither party realised was that in any society of this kind changes take place which require a constant readjustment in the genealogies if they are to continue to carry out their function as mnemonics of social relationships.

...

It is obvious that the process of generation leads in itself to a constant lengthening of the genealogy; on the other hand, the population to which it is linked may in fact be growing at quite a different rate,... ...the added depth of lineages caused by new births needs to be accompanied by a process of genealogical shrinkage; the occurrence of this telescoping process, a common example of the general social phenomenon which J. A. Barnes has felicitously termed "structural amnesia", has been attested in many societies,...

[310]

Organisational changes lead to similar adjustments. ... When asked to explain their system the Gonja recount how the founder of the state, Ndewura Jakpa, came down from the Niger Bend in search of gold, conquered the indigenous inhabitants of the area and enthroned himself as chief of the state and his sons as rulers of its territorial divisions. ... When the details of this story were first recorded at the turn of the present century, at the time the British were extending their control over the area, Jakpa was said to have begotten seven sons,... But at the same time as the British had arrived, two of the seven divisions disappeared,... Sixty years later, when the myths of state were again recorded, Jakpa was credited with only five sons and no mention was made of the founders of the two divisions which had since disappeared from the political map.

These two instances... emphasise that genealogies often serve the same function that Malinowski claimed for myth; they act as 'charters' of present social institutions rather than as faithful historical records of times past. They can do this more consistently because they operate within an oral rather than a written tradition and thus tend to be automatically adjusted to existing social relations as they are passed by word of mouth from one member of the society to another.

Goody and Watt
"The Consequences of Literacy"
(1963)

I theorize a connection between this ideological "telescoping process" and the reason why not just "agriculture" has been instrumentalized but also the occasional odd symphony (and why equating these examples is not absurd).

By now, almost anything enjoyable can be instrumentalized as therapeutic, and different people enjoy different things. I immensely enjoy drafting blog posts like this one, and I enjoy reading them just slightly less. This gives me something to believe in too. I am led to believe also that being able to explain the psychological origin of a well-known work of art is nothing less than a belief system for some people, and not only for the ones who use the most ink and the biggest words to give their account. Yes, by saying this I am psychologizing-about-psychologizing. I am at risk, finally, of giving into the tendency I am writing against. Or, I am outflanking the mechanists without fear of being counter-outflanked by the Francophiles. I would like to see them try; and at the same time I do hesitate to issue the challenge, knowing again that belief and not truth is what sustains a worldview.

And so it is that smart kids play music; worse yet, that the kids themselves have overheard the adults chatting in the cafeteria and now believe that music makes them smart, whether or not this is the truth, and whether or not they've ever taken their instrument home with them over the weekend. The healing powers of the shaman and the determining force of the rain-dancer were doubted as little as is this contemporary article-of-faith in The Power Of Music. That individualism begets naturalism, or Puritanism abstraction, or poverty concreteness, these things are doubted equally little. They belong to the epoch of science, but because they are not made about science itself, they have not been formulated as falsifiable hypotheses. And there we sit.

Finally, then, a paradox: the meeting of certain "supersensible" needs is itself so important as to require, should the task prove elusive, nothing less than willful, instrumentalizing thought-and-action.

From outflanking, we arrive ultimately at outrunning: the instrumentalizing turn has precious little to recommend it (think agriculture as the-beginning-of-the-end), least of all in taking the "supersensible" and rendering it all-too-sensible, until ultimately new means must be found, so thoroughly have the existing means been co-opted. I can't honestly say I believe this to explain in toto the trajectory of the contemplative arts, but I'm not above pointing out that the need to constantly outrun the instrumentalizing turn would explain, by itself, very well the trajectory especially of the art form I myself have known most closely.