Rank—Art and Artist (iii)—The Psychological Ideology of Art

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

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[xiii]

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

...

[xiv] On the one hand, the individual urge to create is by no means the only specific quality of the artist; equally, on the other hand, canons of style, evolved from the collective consciousness, can by no means be regarded as the true essence of artistic creation; the one individual factor represents merely the motive-power, while the other, collective, element provides the forms that are suited in the circumstances to its activity and utterance.

...

[xxiii] in The Trauma of Birth I discerned the fact, which I later developed theoretically, that the creative impulse, which leads to the liberation and forming of the individual personality—and likewise determines its artistic creativeness—has something positively antisexual in its yearning for independence of organic conditions. Correspondingly, my conception of repression differed from Freud's; for to him it is the result of outward frustration, while I trace it to an inward necessity, which is no less inherent in the dualistic individual than the satisfying of the impulse itself.

...

[xxiv] if the neurotic type, who fails to synthesize his dualistic conflict, be studied from the therapeutic angle, the impression received is that of individuals who (psychologically speaking) represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art. ... In short, it would seem that the creatively disposed and gifted type has to have something in addition

[xxv]

before it can become a really productive artist, while on the other hand the work of the productive individual must also be added to before it can rank as a genuine work of art.

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? And although it may seem evident that this common factor in the artist and the art product must be a super-individual, collective element, so obvious a conclusion at once raises a series of questions, the mere meaning of which is enough to show that they but make the real problem more acute. The first among such questions is likely to be: what does this collective factor, both generally and particularly in the creative individual, mean? Following directly upon this comes the next question: what is the characteristic which distinguishes the specific, artistic collectivity—subjective or objective—from others, such as religious, social, or national? In other words, why does the individual, endowed with this mysterious collective force, become now a popular leader, now the founder of a religion, and now an artist?

To this list we might today add the technologist and the entrepreneur as distinctive channelings of the (self-)creative impulse, roles elevated by a slow ideological drift to a formerly unthinkable parity with even political, religious or artistic leadership.

Later Rank writes that "the most vital elements in our culture originate in the satisfaction not of practical, but of religious, supersensible, and ideological needs." Certainly we are overdue for a reckoning with that notion as regards these two areas especially. This would make a good start towards reining them in, if that is our goal, but it's actually more urgent if we want to turn them loose, as many people claim to. Self-seekers are an imminent threat to a technical means of survival, for

by very reason of its impersonality and standardization, a machine art, once it has achieved a high level of form, is not subject to endless variations: the main problem is to keep it at its original high level. ... The capital danger in the arts of the machine is misplaced creativity, in other words trying to make the machine take over the functions of the person.

In short, there is

a tendency on the part of human fantasy, once it is emancipated from the restraint of practical needs, to run riot...

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[3]

Chapter One
CREATIVE URGE AND PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

...

[17] Among these periods of floraison [that is, "the periods of strong development of personality, or of constructive individualism like that predicated of the superman, have always been among the highest periods of artistic productivity"] we have mentioned the prehistoric art of self-dependent man, Classical Greek art, and the Renaissance.

All these periods, which either are individualistic or are carried along by a definite cult of personality, show—in contrast to the abstract and rigid style of Egyptian, Christian, and to a certain extent even Gothic art—a vivid naturalism which is certainly no imitation of nature, but rather an organic vitalization of fossilizing art-forms.

We have indicated in the Introduction the psychical significance of this antithesis and how it may be psychologically understood. Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-consciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces.

Art also, which sprang organically from self-feeling, is then subordinated to the creator.

Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual.

The conflict between art and religion, which we can so easily trace in the individual artist, is thus ultimately a conflict between individuality and collectivity, the dualistic struggle within the creative artist of the two impulses of his own self.

In this sense there is a reciprocal dependence between

[18]

art and religion, but, concurrent with it from the outset, an opposition between them.

For, on the one hand, the artist has need of religion so as to make his own impulse towards immortality collective, while religion needs the artist in order to make concrete its abstract notion of the soul;

on the other hand, the artist seeks to eternalize his individuality apart from the collective ideologies, while religion would deny the individual in favour of the community.

Thus though art is in the the last resort anti-collectivist—in spite of the fact that it makes use of the various communal ideologies, especially of contemporary religion and the style dependent on it—it yet needs these collective ideologies, even if only to overcome them from time to time by the force of personality.

This fact may perhaps explain why the present age, with its strong individualism, has failed to produce any great art like other periods marked by strong personality and consequent alienation from religion.

Well, we will see about that, eventually.

It's not clear (yet) just why a profusion of micro-ideologies is not sufficient, even in absence of one big one, to inspire artists to overcome one or more of them. It's also quite possible (for some of us, at least) to find the big fucked-up outside world more or less of a piece with itself and therefore to simply imagine (dare I day to experience ) a unified communal ideology where one technically does not exist. (Obviously this kind of radical individualism is more problematic politically and socially even if it is highly productive culturally.)

Rank has broken with Freud and rejected much Freudian orthodoxy, but there remains here the implication that all of this intricate give and take between individual and collective takes place, as we say nowadays of our iDevices, in the background, i.e. that we are not conscious of it; whereby so many problem s of art arise as epistemological rather than functional problems. We can see the results but the process is almost totally opaque. Twentieth-century sociology also, it seems, went on a journey of triangulation rather than exploration.

On this sort of question there is a stunning passage from Rank's Truth and Reality which I don't totally understand yet and may have already excerpted here. I'm compelled to excerpt it again anyway.

the will—in its negative form—presses in past emotion and must deny even while it sanctions it. ... In relation to practical action, to behavior, the result is that we pride ourselves on playing a role when it has to do with true emotional reaction. We actually play, then, what we are in truth, but perceive it as untrue, as false, because again we cannot accept ourselves without rationalization. ...

The understanding of this relation between truth and reality is not only highly important psychologically... but also practically for judging the actions resulting therefrom. This explains why we rightly judge a man by his actions and these again according to their manifest appearance, as not only the laity but also justice and education do. For the psychic motivation, upon which one finally stumbles with careful analysis, may be psychically true but it is not actually like the act itself whose psychological understanding always includes its interpretation in terms of the will-guilt problem.

(p. 41)

[18] These other periods had strength in their religious and anti-religious currents, as well as other powerful collective ideologies, which our present-day society in its disruption lacks.

Similarly, Paul Goodman:

"By and large,
where censorship of certain ideas is strong,
the ideas are taken seriously...
the kind of total freedom that we have for such writings
may be evidence
that reasoned ideas
don't much influence our institutions.

(Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, p. 242)

Even if nowadays, with the decay of religious faith, the artist is immeasurably overvalued, this seems only a last effort at reestablishing a similarly decaying cult of the personality, of which we are just as incapable as we are of collective faith.

So, we actually have become incapable of sustaining the cult of personality even though the artist is immeasurably overvalued in precisely this manner?

Again, Rank is on the hunt for dominant or hegemonic ideologies, for the cultural homogeneity that was already breaking down in the century before his. But by now it seems safe to say that personality cults (or something very much like them) have continued to exist as artifacts of niche culture. You can still be famous for being famous.

True, there was, probably, a time when the artist did play the part of the religious hero on earth,...the time, that is, when there arose content and concept of genius...

this idea has not always existed, though there were geniuses before it. The necessity for the birth of this idea, and its elaboration into a cult of personality, whose last stages only are known to us, seem to me to have arisen from the incessant conflict with, and final conquest of, these collective ideologies by a new type of humanity, which appeared first in Greece, but had to be reborn for west-

[19]

ern Europe in Italy. For Greece had, in spite of its extraordinary personality-culture, a strong national idea which defined the type, while in the Renaissance a new European personal consciousness arose which towered above religious and national boundaries and established a reign of humanism which could vie with collective Christianity.

So, collective ideologies were conquest ed by a new type of humanity and ultimately a reign of humanism . Really the key phrase, though, is incessant conflict , which grants (whatever one thinks of this "humanism") that these epochs were not psychologically sustainable for the individuals who comprised them.

The notion of genius as it grew up between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century was created by the artist as a new ideology,...

this new "religion of genius," as Zilsel calls it, centred on a type and no longer on a collectivity; it was indeed individual and even psychological, in its emphasis, based wholly on the artist and no longer on art, on style. ...

Now for the first time there appears the creative artist of the modern age, whose epigoni today produce their art without possessing either the collective ideology of earlier ages or the individual religion of genius which has produced the greatest of our great artists...

Such men as these...are alone and unique—in spite of their countless imitators—for they are individual; and not only in their personality and the works born from it, but their whole ideology is individual, since it springs from the notion of genius and is only possible through it.

I'm not historically equipped to evaluate artists' own role in developing the notion of genius, unless we are really only talking about art. Otherwise it seems tenuous to omit scientists and statespersons. (And technologists and entrepreneurs, and...)

Certainly these artists' whole ideology is individual , but the advent of individualism is plainly bigger than any art-specific inquiry can handle, even if the (narrower) ideology of genius is not.

[20] ... The idea of the "Genius" comes originally from early Roman times, when it means the personal protecting spirit, of man, as opposed to woman, where it is called "Juno"...

...the Roman Genius, in keeping with the cultural idea of Rome which was built up on the right of the father, acquired the literal meaning of "begetter."

...[yet] the current explanation of Genius as a deified incarnation of masculine reproductive power does not fully explain the idea. Thus, Genius is also the god of one's birthday—and Otto concluded that the idea contains, as well as the notion of begetting, that of the descent also and indeed that of the continuity of all life.

...it is precisely the stage of father-right that is characterized by the collectivizing of the personal reproductive impulse. And so the Roman idea of Genius contains from the beginning, in addition to the individual urge to reproduction, a collective element which points beyond the individual, in a way that is not true of the Egyptian Ka and the Greek daimon, both of which are purely personal. For this reason it was specially fitted to become a social conception of genius that should include both individual and collective elements.

So, because the personal protecting spirit of woman was purely personal , it lacked the complementary collective element needed to form a social conception ?

Hmm...

Still the artist's concept of genius is more personal than the collective and thus needs a new ideology.

This could no longer be a personal peculiarity of style deduced from a collective idea of the soul, but had to become an aesthetic of feeling dependent on consciousness of personality.

[21]

Thus the eighteenth century, which was completely sterile of any collective art and was distinguished only by a few dominant artistic individualities,

Hmm...

produced an æsthetic as abstracted from the art-products of earlier ages.

Abstracted here meaning that the technical conventions and surface content were appropriated while the consciousness of personality remained, as it always does, lost to time.

This was not, however, the universally valid "science of art" that it was for so long supposed to be,

Well of course not.

but was itself a new ideology of art,

The I-word has been all but used up at this point, and that makes it difficult to keep one's bearings. (And of course the translation issue is ever-present here.)

which was to replace the now decadent religious collective ideology by a psychological artistic ideology corresponding to the new genius-type. Æsthetic is thus the psychological ideology of art, born from the notion of the genius-type and not from the collective—and religious—notion of style.

Vintage Rank here.

Æsthetic is born between abstract ion and ideology , much as we are born between urine and feces. But we do not spend the rest of our lives wallowing, nor is aestheticism condemned to an eternal eighteenth century purgatory.

Our Classicist æsthetic in fact directs its gaze much more to the individual art-product of Classical artists, while the abstract style of which Worringer speaks appears much more as a collective product.

When Worringer explains the incongruence of art-history and æsthetic by the fact that our æsthetic is nothing more than a psychology of the Classical way of feeling art, he is certainly right; but there will probably always be a similar incongruence between every ideology and its concretization,...

In addition to this natural divergence between an ideology and its concretization, there is in artistic creation yet another decisive factor which æsthetic would have to neglect entirely if it sought to make its laws absolute, and this is the personality of the artist, with his own system of ideology, which perhaps runs largely parallel with the general, but by no means coincides with it.

Here, at last, is some acknowledgment of diversity.

...even Worringer underestimates the influence of the creative personality when he is dealing with art- and style-forms from the standpoint of their æsthetic effects, however he may emphasize the importance of abstract art as well as intuitive.

[22]

True, in a summing-up which is perhaps the culminating point of his magnificent argument, Worringer says that the psychological victory over this æsthetic dualism is found in the demand for self-renunciation which lies at the root of all æsthetic experience and which is achieved now by intuition (Einfühlung), now by abstraction. But it is just these ultimate psychological problems of art that will trip us up if we have neglected or inadequately understood the creative personality,...

...even at the outset it seems to me clear that the idea of intuition (Einfühlung) as fashioned by psychological æsthetic has been attained as from a view-point of reception, while the notion of abstraction which Worringer contrasts with it refers rather to the spiritual attitude of the creative artist.

In any case there is here a vagueness of concepts...[which] belongs to all æsthetic. ...

[23]

...

Without disputing that in some cases the artist does aim at a definite idea effect in his work, it is certainly not the rule...

[the work may also be] essentially an expression of his personality. ...

While æsthetic pleasure, whether in the creator or in the contemplator, is ultimately a renunciation of self, the essence of the creative impulse is the exactly opposite tendency towards assertion of self. Here again, however, we must be careful not to set up this opposition, in the form in which we have to state it, as if it were absolute.

...the dualism of the individual and the community, which we showed to be the fundamental conflict, appears here also in a psychological form and in its relation to various forms of art. ...

[24]

...

[the individualist genius type] must have existed previously as a creative type in the sense of an urge to self-assertion, since otherwise no art, and least of all the strongly marked naturalistic art of prehistoric man, would have been possible. ...

Psychologically the notion of genius, of which we see the last reflection in our modern artist-type, is the apotheosis of man as a creative personality: the religious ideology (looking to the glory of God) being thus transferred to man himself. ...

This artist, liberated from God, himself become god, soon overleaps the collective forms of style and their abstract formulation in æsthetic and constructs new forms of an individual nature, which cannot, therefore, be subsumed under laws.

Lest the difficulty of formulating laws and the inability to subsume be accepted as proof of the folly of individualism, the question must be asked: why such subsumption , and in whose interests?

And so our Classicist æsthetic of the eighteenth century appears as a final attempt to save the Classical forms—if not wholly, at any rate in abstract formulæ—before they were shattered by individual Sturm und Drang effort of the self-creative personality.

And here is where the psychologizing and sociologizing turns can be turned back upon the mechanists and the codifiers: what else could possibly be evinced by this desperate final attempt but an Escape From Freedom?

Given the dualism of the individual and the community, which we showed to be the fundamental conflict , a community that wants to survive needs to make some concessions, somewhere along the line, to individualism. If it cannot afford to do so even in the area of art, something is awry.

Æsthetic appears here as the last endeavour to find art's psychological justification in itself, which corresponds exactly to the self-justification of the artist in the psychological type of the genius.

Here begins the "art for art's sake" ideology, and here too is the source of all artistic psychology, both of which began with

[25]

the birth of the genius-notion.

If it began there, it doesn't end there. See insertions above.

Creation is scalable: we can write for the drawer as much as we want. Reception is zero-sum: the more people empty their drawers upon a community, the less reception there is to go around.

We often hear that Creation is therapeutic, and it is for a few people; but really it is Reception (that is, recognition, attention, validation) which turns the therapeutic trick for the teeming normie horde. This Rankian thread is taken up with a vengeance by Becker a few decades later.

[26] The fact that we all dream and, in dreams, are all (in the fine comparison of Schopenhauer) poets of the stature of Dante or Shakspere is sufficient by itself to force to our notice the fact that we do not know what it is which allows a Dante or a Shakspere to do in waking life what we all, according to Schopenhauer, do in our sleep.

They all (as I expressed it) superadd, to their equipment and their creative dream-fantasy, a particular ideology of art. ...

[27]

... The neurotic, no matter whether productive or obstructed, suffers fundamentally from the fact that he cannot or will not accept himself,... On one hand he criticizes himself to excess, on the other he idealizes himself to excess,...

If we take this thwarted type, as we may do for our purposes, and compare him to the artist, it is at once clear that the artist is in a sense the anithesis to the self-critical neurotic type. Not that the artist does not criticize himself, but by accepting his personality he not only fulfils that for which the neurotic is striving in vain, but goes far beyond it.

The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only its acceptance, but its actual glorification, of itself.

The religion of genius and the cult of personality thus begin, in the creative individual, with himself; he, so to say, appoints himself as an artist, though this is only possible if the society in which he lives has and ideology of genius, recognizes it, and values it.

This leads straight to the realization that the productive personality, if it has once accomplished this self-appointment by the aid of his community's ideology of the artist, must justify this self-assertion under compulsion by its work and by ever higher achievement.

And so the problem of the process of artistic creation, which is no more than a compulsory dynamic, shifts to its precondition, which is the glorification of the individual personality. ...

We see that the very same process which at the primitive stage of the collective abstract style relates to the object takes place at the developed stage of individual art,

[28]

in relation to the subject; in other words, the individual raises himself from out of the community by his inclusion in the genius-type in just the same way as the object is torn from its natural surroundings by its artistic stylization.

The individual, as it were, abstracts himself in the style demanded by the genius-ideology and so concentrates the essence of his being, the reproductive urge, in the genius-concept.

He says, more or less, that he needs only to create and not to beget. The novelty of our present view lies, however, in this: that we have good reason for assuming that this creativity begins with the individual himself—that is, with the self-making of the personality into the artist, which we have described previously as his appointment to the genius-type.

The creative artist personality is thus the first work of the productive individual, and it remains fundamentally his chief work, since all his other works are partly the repeated expression of this primal creation, partly a justification by dynamism.

I regard it as the double advantage of this insight into artistic personality-development which is gained from a study of the modern type, not only that it is applicable to the understanding of all cultural genesis, but that, moreover...artistic personality appears to subsist already in the beginning of all artistic production.

Certain modern art-historians assume that the origin of primitive art is to be found neither in the imitation of nature nor in the impulse to abstraction, but in bodily ornament. ...

[29]

...we should be justified in saying that the tendency toward self-creation which is brought to light in modern artist-psychology is one of the essential components of artistic creation even in primitive times.

So, "hands off yourself" just won't cut it if there is to be any art at all.

Here also is a major clue to how Rank claims to know what he knows, and it is, admittedly, not a particularly strong case and in any case not subject to much development or accumulation of evidence short of a time machine.

E. von Sydow...accepts the view that "the beginning of art lay in its application to the body." ...it is apparently psycho-analysis which led him to this idea.

...[but this] would be a confirmation on their part [psychoanalysts] of a view which is alien to them. For this view of art presupposes a voluntaristic psychology, which in my own case I was only able to reach after passing beyond the libido theory of Freud,...

[30]

... Whatever the meaning of the much-disputed tatooing as the essential expression of body-art may be, it is at least certain that practical objects, such as hardening the skin or the attraction or repulsion of others, do not have a great bearing.

...there is no sort of consensus of opinion as to the real point of this magical painting of the body. ...[but surely] an artistic achievement is also part of the business.

...Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others.

Both would explain why tatooing follows on the puberty ceremonies at which the indi-

[31]

vidual becomes both a personality and a member of a community.

It is worth interjecting here
that
in a properly multicultural society, certainly,
and perhaps in any merely ethnically diverse post-industrial society,
the
tribal marking

which robs him of his personality
in order to include him in a community,

and yet on the other hand
does not merely label him,
but enhances his individual significance
by
marking it off from certain others,

this dual
(dialectical?)
aspect of such marking
is
greatly intensified
.

On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society.

We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art ["personality" vs. "community"] even at the primary stage of human creative instinct.

From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the "Bohemian" artist of modern times...had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and the beard, which were to mark him out as a "genius."

...according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide,...

...even at this last stage of the "artist's art," we have the genius-type to which the artist tries to suit himself even in costume and manner, serving as an ideology for artistic creation; just as earlier aesthetic, and still earlier religion, had provided the art-ideologies of their various times and places.

Yet, be it observed, these were ideologies of art—that is, collective style-laws, as in religious art, or psychological laws of feeling in aesthetes' art; but at this latest stage of individual artist's art we are concerned no longer with an

[32]

ideology of art, whether abstract or emotional, but an ideology of the artist; and this means a justification of art-creation in the creative personality itself that struggles for eternalization, and not a justification of art by some abstract impulse of the soul, as in religion, or in aesthetic of sensation, as in psychology.

Now, though Worringer quite rightly opposes linear art, which develops from the impulse to abstraction, to the Classical art which is intuitive, this is obviously not enough, for we have here a third type of art, which is as different from the other two as the one is from the other.

If we want a word to set in parallel with "abstraction" and "intuition" as expressing the spiritual attitude of modern art, based on an individual, we may talk of an art of "expression"—in fact the word, as "expressionism," has been taken as their slogan by a group of modern artists...

We might also note that expression denotes an aspiration rather than a certainty, depending as it does on the recipient of the message to decode it accurately. This is the highest- rather than the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree of modern art .

And besides, we already have a spiritual attitude that is based on an individual : individualism. Wouldn't it be both more honest and more enlightening to leave things there?

It is too tempting to look for a historical comparison and a cultural valuation of this "modern art"; Worringer, strangely enough, does not admit modern art to be the expression of any "will to form" of its own, but regards it rather as an expression of "inability," which he does, however, concede to the result of an excessive urge to equal—or to outdo—earlier epochs.

That does seem to be part of it. And if so, then here is another one-sided reductionism which we can safely consign to the proverbial dustbin: modern art as pure negation, scorched earth, cultural vandalism, etc.

...it is more important to notice in these art-forms only the exaggeration (or, if you like, the distortion) of a quality common to all creative art, which entitles such an art as this to its place with the rest in the development of forms;

in the same way as we tried to understand abstract and naturalistic styles not only as art-forms but as psychical expressions. Then we shall see that we have here to deal not with a third type of art, nor indeed with a type of art or a style at all, but with spiritual needs which at one time are abstract,

[33]

at another naturalistic, at a third individualistic.

It is not our business [for now] to attempt an æsthetic judgment... Yet it may be that the genesis of the creative personality...will throw a new light on the form of art which is included under the æsthetic law of intuition (Einfühlung) and may even contribute to the elucidation of other, still obscure points in that abstract style of primitive art which so purely expresses the absolute will to form.

[end of chapter]

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[37]

Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

... If...the instinctive will to art...has in this last stage of artistic development become a conscious will-to-art in the artist, yet the actual process which leads a man to become an artist is usually one of which the individual is not conscious. ... [still] this purely internal process does not suffice to make an artist, let alone a genius, for...only the community, one's contemporaries, or posterity can do that.

In other words,
the audience holds all the power,
not merely
in
the market
but also
in
the gravest existential matters
.

...

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[69]

Chapter Three
ART-FORM AND IDEOLOGY

...

[71] Whereas
primitive art is perpetuated through abstraction, and
Classical art achieves immortality through idealization,
Romantic art rounds off this immense transformation-process of spiritual development
in making
vivification
its chosen mode of overcoming that fear of death
from which the immortality-idea and urge to eternalization first sprang.

Primitive art looks beyond the individual, mortal life
towards an everlasting life of the soul.
And the essence of Classical art lies in
the fact that it renders life itself everlasting...

...modern art, with its dynamic of expression, differs from both these style-forms;
neither starts from an abstract of the living nor aims at an ideal conservation of it, but its style-form consists in a vivification of the essence of the actual.

This can, however, only be achieved at the cost of real life.

[72]

The three art-ideologies, as we thus differentiate them—

the abstract,
the æsthetic, and
the realistic

—are based therefore on varying attitudes to life itself,

and these attitudes,
although determined by the prevailing collective ideology,
will still be found to vary in the different individuals of the same epoch.

Now,
it is my belief that a non-contemporary outlook
on vital problems
is always essential to the artist,
an outlook

[72]

which deviates more or less from the prevailing ideology and its art-style.

In other words,
I believe that the artist's personality,
however strongly it may express the spirit of the age,
must nevertheless bring him into conflict
with that age
and with his contemporaries;

and this again explains
why
he is obliged, in his work,
to convert the collective ideology
into one of his own.

In this sense
not only does a work of art represent
unity of form and content,
but it achieves also
a unification of personal and collective
ideologies of immortality.

This of course cries out for consideration of those personalities who express the spirit of the age neither intently nor unwittingly but rather (self-)consciously or, better yet, "ironically", as in Sontag's conception of irony as the artist pre-interpreting their own work, "install[ing]" a "clear and explicit interpretation", and thereby showing the writer to be quite "uneasy before the naked power of his art."

Rank has mentioned in passing that a popular leader is endowed with much the same mysterious collective force as the great artist-personality , and that it can be difficult to pinpoint just what it is that channels such people into one or the other métier. Yet for all the talk here of ideology , I don't know that the archetypal Nationalist is well-accounted for by Rank's theory, as far as he was able to take it. Speaking again in Sontag's terms, the Nationalist is also the supreme ironist for whom "something we have learned to call form is separated off from something we have learned to call content". This separation is achieved so thoroughly and unambiguously that a good Rankian begins to wonder if the elimination of ambiguity is the ultimate psychological goal and the Nationalism merely a means to this end.

I propose that we can say the same of factions within "nations," e.g. Black Nationalism and Gay Liberation, on and on to a generalized Identity Politics whereby any given "identity" per se ascends to the position of what Rank calls a collective form ; collective, that is, in the sense of being shared-in-by-many, though certainly it is not universal, as in shared-in-by-all. Much is made (rightly) of the psychological and political conundrum this raises for these groups: to dissipate their identity in the existing hegemonic forms, or to preserve their identity at the risk of being railroaded into ironism?

Rank's theory can explain the psychological side of this immaculately, less so the political side. To do that we need to adduce a theory of what has been come to be known as hegemony. For me, mostly but not exclusively situated inside rather than outside the hegemony du jour, separatist ironism would seem to intensify rather than resolve the psychological conflict bequeathed to us by Identity Politics. Indeed, this conflict is bequeathed even to us middle-class white men the moment we are confronted with all manner of mechanistic explanations for our own behavior and cultural production; the very same explanations, that is, which Rank here rejects, and which are based on an identity that others attach to us rather than us to ourselves

Hence Rank's project, on top of its scholarly applications, is interesting to me on a purely personal level too. But ultimately it is not the powerful but the powerless who suffer most, here as elsewhere, from unjust reduction to one-sided explanations. The uncomfortable fact, unspeakable even in certain circles, is that the Identity Ironist performs this reduction upon themselves more thoroughly than any white hegemon could do it for or to them.

Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. At the risk of contravening any technical aspects of this aphorism of which I might be ignorant, I would propose that theories of art are born of measurement; also that they tend to return there to die, having inevitably become "targets" for academic hangers-on, midlife arrivistes, and other insecures.

Despite the fearsome resistance to facile measurement and the just outrage at measurement's central role in rationalizing oppression, the Identity Ironist's crusade makes measurement a target. As theorists of "postmodernism" were first to articulate, both intuition and aesthetic are abandoned by the wayside here. Ditto the internal drama of individual and collective forms, which is confounded by an intermediating factor, Identity, which is neither individual nor collective.

...

[80] the collective element of mythic and epic poetry...
A race or nation appears as the victorious hero of the story,
mostly in the figure of an individual champion...
In every case the hero and his fate are the main thing,
and not the poet,
in whom we should take little interest if we did know him.
For the motive of his song

[81]

and saga was,
at this stage,
certainly not individual, but collective
or, as we should call it today,
"national."

[Whereas for] The individual author of modern times...
he himself, his individual ego,
is the real hero of his story.

In lyric poetry, with its reflection of fleeting moods,
this is plainly and admittedly the case,
but it also applies
to a great extent
to novels
and
even to dramas.

Gee, d'ya think?

(It absolutely does apply to music too, but the respects in which this is true are different enough to confound most direct comparisons of music with literature.)

It is as if the personal artist-ideology, which we have taken as the foundation of modern art, comes in the individual poet to consciousness of itself.

Hence the favoured position,
the high cultural significance indeed,
of the author as censor of morals,
philosopher of life,
and education of mankind in our world of today.

In attaining this position of general responsibility he has, however, left the sphere of pure creativity, which, from now on, he represents only in his ideology.

Notice what is gained and what is lost this way.

He is now himself the work of art,
but as such he can represent
either
a good or a bad one,
according to whether and how he suceeds
in shaping his life.

The joke of course being on the author whenever the goalposts are moved vis-a-vis good and bad .

In this respect the assumption of general responsibility , though superficially it seems broader and more meaningful than the moral arbitrariness of pure creativity , really is no better armoring against the risk of falling out of fashion.

Goethe remains, in this regard also, the unparalleled model of a universal genius of the modern age;
for he was able to balance the destructive elements in him creatively,
by absorbing them into his poetry and his various other constructive activities,
and thus to shape his life as an artistic-constructive whole.

Other great writers have failed to achieve so complete a harmony,
either
ruining the artistic build of their lives by Romanticism
or
leading a philistine existence in order to have enough vitality left over for creation. ...

[82]

...all depends in the last resort upon whether the individual is capable of restoring harmony, or at least a temporary balance, between the two forms of experience—artistic and vital—and to what extent he succeeds.

Here I think of the old Davis Love III commercial:
"Do your hands know what it feels like to hit a golf ball 330 yards?"
Do you know what it actually feels like to strike this balance?

If you did, it would certainly change your perception of and views towards pretty much everything else.

And of course if you only think you've achieved this when you really haven't, you might still change your perception and views, thereby becoming an intolerable egotist asshole.

This does not by any means signify that the person who better adapts himself to, or succeeds in, life must needs be the better artist.

In this respect Goethe forms signal exception in the whole long line of really great men whose lives have been swallowed whole by their work.

Croce maintains that this was the case even with Goethe, but in reality the man Goethe has come to be more important to us than his work,...

Goethe himself looked upon his work as "fragments of one great confession," as "life's traces,"...

His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second...

A mediocre work, acceptable only to a small circle, may yet satisfy the artist more and mean more to him than the undying world-fame of a poem that has grown into a folk-song, the author of which most people are quite at a loss to name.

Note well that this small circle   satisfaction is particularistic while undying world-fame without name -recognition is universalistic; and this confounds certain contemporary trope-ideologies. It especially complicates the construction of post-industrial mass culture as feminine.

Again, we must admit that the psychology of a productive personality gives no clue to the understanding and appreciation of art.

The Romantic who, having adopted the attitude that I once called "artist-mania" and now call art-ideology, neglects or sacrifices or even destroys his life has often achieved more in art than the genius who allows the human being in him to come to fruition also. ...

[83]

... As Bahr so excellently puts it, his [Goethe's] achievement lay in having "put down the revolution by which he had risen" and "in recognizing that art's freedom lay in its submission to the law."

This explains his aversion from all Romanticism, which meant, at bottom, from the Romantic within himself;

for the Romantic stands at the other end of the scale of artistic development as the pioneer and earliest specimen of the individual artist-type, whose art-ideology is the cult of personality with its idea of liberty.

Not only is he an individual-revolutionary in creation, but he confuses life with art: he is dramatic or lyrical, he acts the piece instead of objectifying it, or rather he is obliged to act it as well as merely objectify it.

His art is as chaotic as his life, whereas the pure art-ideology is based on order, law, and form—in fact, on traditional and therefore collective ideologies.

Now, Goethe wished to reestablish this pure art epistemologically, and therein lies his greatness as an artist-type. First, however, he had to curb the individual Romantic in himself,

and this he succeeded in doing, though only at the expense of his productive power, which exhausted itself in the conscious and deliberate transformation of the Romantic type represented by him into a Classical artist-type, and which nevertheless he never completely achieved in his work.

If Goethe's importance lies rather in his representing the purely Classical ideal, as against the personal artist-ideology of Romanticism, than in his actual creative work, he is perhaps the first example—and at the same time the highest possible type—of the poet who becomes a universal genius.

Also, in our own day, such a type could express himself as an essayist, a cultural critic, or a first-class journalist. As we have already pointed out, our modern author has become conscious of the personal art-ideology that is within him;

but the first result of the process has been to project this intuitively recognized artist-ideology on to the history of art and to misinterpret the whole of its development in the light of its latest phase.

Word up.

We

[84]

have seen how the establishment of a will-to-form (originally impersonal) as the real creative element had an essentially progressive and deepening effect on the study of art as a problem,

and we shall find that the extended application of this theory to the genius's personal, and the modern artist's conscious, will-to-art has thrown new light on the whole question of art and artist. ...

However abstract we imagine the primitive will-to-art that is supposed to produce simple art-forms of crystalline structure, it still retains a tinge of anthropomorphism...

For the will is a human phenomenon, and we cannot assume offhand that Nature and all her creatures possess it, even in the form of "unconscious willing."

Certainly, in our view, the individual will is a derivative of the biological life-impulse, but it is a purely human derivative,...

this differentiation between life-impulse and expression of will, which psycho-analysis has ignored, seems to me to be the basic human problem par excellence since it comprises both the dualism of ego and species, of mortality and immortality, that is inherent in the individual, and all those creative tendencies which go beyond the mere function of propagation.