James Hillman and Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse
(1992)
[124]
Substance Abuse and Soul in Things
Dear Michael,I want to lay out—practically!—the connection between soul and things. Then it will be clearer what it means to be a "psychological citizen."
It all begins with symptoms—the classical beginning in depth psychology. ...
Follow the symptoms. Pathology always leads into new unknowns. Our whole field of psychotherapy may simply be a reaction to symptoms. As they change from decade to decade—we don't see cases like Freud and Jung saw at the beginning of the century—therapy invents new ideas and new interpretations.
What are the symptoms now? Alar on your apples; asbestos around your heating pipes; lead in the paint on the schoolroom ceiling;...
... To live, I must be alert, constantly suspicious, on guard at the cave's mouth. But it's not a saber-toothed tiger that'll get me and my clan, it's the friendly family fridge ruining the ozone.
If I were of a different culture, we would say: spells have been cast, bad magic; we have fallen out of favor with the spirits; my vitality is being sapped by invisibles. By attributing death-dealing effects to things—microwave oven, asbestos, cigarette smoke, hot dog—I am saying that they have enough moxie to knock us out and do us in. The object has become animated by the symptom. It is an alien power to be wary of,
[125]
eradicate, or propitiate. "Don't stand too close to the microwave while it's on; keep the windows unsealed so that the air can circulate;...
You see what I am driving at: my suspicions and my precautionary rituals announce that I am living in an animated world. Things are no longer just dead materials, objects, stuff.
Take this one step further: perhaps the bad magic comes not only from the material cause of things, but also from their formal cause. (Aristotle explains that all events have a material cause like the stone or wood of a sculpture and a formal cause like its idea, design, shape.) Suppose we are being harmed as much by the form of things as by their material, where form means their aesthetic quality. ... The soul, which has classically been defined as the form of living bodies, could be affected by the form of other bodies (design, shape, color, innate idea or "image") in the same way as the matter of our bodies is affected by the matter of other bodies (pesticides, additives, preservatives).
Plotinus makes this clear (On Beauty I.6.2): "The things in this world are beautiful by participating in form. . . . A thing is ugly when it is not mastered by some shape" (form, morphe) You and I are psychologically in bad shape because our physical world is bent out of shape. And, Plotinus says in the same passage, this is because "when the soul meets with the ugly it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, out of tune, resenting it." Plotinus here describes the clinical condition of the psyche turning itself in for therapy: out of tune, withdrawn, resentful. The ugly makes us neurotic.
If it is the form of things that disturbs the soul, then the task of therapy becomes noticing noxious forms. Every citizen is already concerned with the material nature of things, their ecological value (recycling, protecting, conserving), but the special role of the psychological citizen is the awakening and refining of aesthetic sensitivity.
[126]
Why the psychological citizen? Because psychoanalysis teaches "seeing through," an intuition into what is invisibly going on, which particular forms are within and behind events—... This means that the job for therapy becomes one of supporting the citizens' formal perceptions , and these require civil courage, just like the personal courage required in personal relationships. Civil courage in an ecological age means not only demanding social justice, but also aesthetic justice and the will to make judgments of taste, to stand for beauty in the public arena and speak out about it.
Consciousness of form would make us feel how assaulted and insulted we are all day long by the thoughtless ideas in things: by pretentious buildings, noisy ventilation,... The aesthetic eye would require things to be thoughtfully designed. And this attention turned from self to things would begin nursing back to health the soul of the world. Aesthetic hygiene. ... Deep ecology begins in our aesthetic responses , and the citizen's reentry into political participation starts in his or her declarations of taste.
We would begin to revision substance abuse, perhaps for the first time recognizing that material substances into which we have concretized "abuse"—alcohol, drugs, caffeine, sugar—are acute concentrations of the chronic abuse we unwittingly tolerate and that comes from the abusive substance or form of things. ...it's very possible that we become addicted to material substances by getting into that an-aesthesia, or hyper-aesthesia called an altered state so as not to sense the aesthetic insults we are suffering.
All of a sudden there seems hardly any difference between depth psychology and design. Imagine that! People have been trying to dissolve depth psychology back into religion, saying you go to your analyst like a priest or confessor, and they have been dissolving analysis into Asian wisdom philosophy
[127]
(analyst as guru); into education... Here I am coming up with yet one more way of dissolving therapy into something else: interior decorator, architect, urban planner, product designer.
There's a difference , however. I think therapy and design part company at the point where design strives always for the good, that canon of pleasing unity and harmonious balance—"good" taste— whereas therapy as aesthetics would want mainly to sensitize imagination . Now, here's the rub: peeling away the skin and opening the imagination always invites the demonic, and that disrupts "good" design . It's not enough to be in a tastefully decorated room. White bread therapy has all along secured itself in well-appointed consulting rooms, with comfortable chairs and artistic ornamentation. "Good" design can lead to the mediocrity of normal adaptation rather than into the depths of soul .
Depth means death and demons and dirt and darkness and disorder and a lot of other industrial strength d words familiar to therapy, like dysfunctional, disease, defense, distortion, drives, drugs, and despair. So design that invites depth will indeed focus on form, but this focus will not exclude the pathological. The problem for the designer, like that for the therapist, is to coordinate the pathological within design, so that psyche's d's are neither excluded like a Disneyland mall nor running around loose like an urban sprawl. Therapy has to be sublime. Terror has to be included in its beauty . So too in design. It seems only our war equipment so far shows this sense of the sublime in design.
...
[128]
...
The movies tie landscape, architecture, furniture, light, human movement, and talk into a single shot of soul. The set presents the pathologies of the plot as much as do the dialogue and the action. And the citizens, just come from their therapy hours and now sitting in the audience, gain in the movie house deep psychological learning simply by participating in the aesthetic details displayed through the camera.
These are the models for thinking about therapy that I am looking for because they are rooted in the psyche of the world. As this century closes we have begun to think of the human mind less as a part of physical nature and historical culture , as in Freud's and Jung's day, and more as a participant in media images . Interiority is all in presentation. If design can form the faces of the world into receptacles for the soul's strange predilections, then therapy can notice the things and places where the plot of human lives... takes actual shape and can begin to care for, even heal, the soul out there.
If we keep pushing this parallel, if we keep revisioning therapy as an aesthetic activity, some surprising consequences emerge. ... Instead of the expressive arts people—dance, music, and arts staff—getting the least pay and respect, they would become more valued than the Ph.D's and M.D's. ...the dispenser of chemicals (psychiatrist) would drop down to the minor role of strait-jacket man brought in as last resort.
...
This little revolution that raises the aesthetic to top rung would help reimagine therapeutic work as a deanesthetizing, an awakening, lifting the "psychic numbing"...
[129]
... Each thing we notice springs to life: reanimation, reenchantment. The persons hidden in things as their forms speak up, speak out. The clinic becomes truly a madhouse, everything alive, and our concern turns from ourselves to its life. Door, how do you feel that nobody can close you right and you have to be slammed shut? Little plastic cup, do you like being thrown away? Wouldn't you rather be a real hard china mug touched by eager lips many, many times, washed out, kept on a shelf? ...
Shifting us into an aesthetic loop will run us into a host of prejudices backed by academic arguments . Such as: aesthetic taste is a subjective personal affair in the eye and tongue of the beholder and cannot provide empirical, sound theory for therapy. Such as: aesthetics is always secondary to the major therapeutic issues like healing, moral improvement, and societal cohesion. Such as: concern with aesthetic form and design is luxury compared with the real problems of material toxicity and the real economic problems that are harming the patient. Beauty never solved anything.
Unlike ancient Egypt and Greece or modern Bali or the bird-feathered, body-painted, masked "primitives" of Papua New Guinea, our culture just can't accept aesthetics as essential to the daily round. The prejudices against beauty expose our culture's actual preference for ugliness disguised as the useful, the practical, the moral, the new, and the quick. The reason for this repression of beauty, in therapy too... is nothing less than the taproot of all American culture: puritanism .
You see, taste, as the word itself says, awakens the senses and releases fantasies. Taste remembers beauty; it enjoys pleasure; it tends to refine itself toward more interesting joys. Puritanism would much rather focus on hard realities and moral choices that you have to suffer through and work for. But for me, the greatest moral choice we can make today, if we are
[130]
truly concerned with the oppressed and stressed lives of our clients' souls, is to sharpen their sense of beauty.
In one stroke we've made peace between the moralistic superego and the pleasure-driven id, ended that chronic war between guilt and greed, denial and lust, shame and appetite. It was a battle created by therapeutic theory, not by the psyche; a theory that says therapy fosters moral improvement (called developmental maturity) rather than the refinement of pleasure. No need for that war if we imagine the superego to be an aesthetic rather than a moral principle. Then the id would not be condemned for its desires or dissuaded from its pleasures, but would be encouraged from above to find for them more fertile fantasies and superior forms.
Otherwise, therapy remains Victorian, stuck in its nineteenth-century moral individualistic origins and its inherent contempt for the world, which ever seduces the id into acting out its pleasures. ... Remember this marvelous definition of beauty: "Beauty is pleasure objectified. Beauty is pleasure perceived as a quality of an object" (George Santayana). So the road to beauty follows the signposts of pleasure. And Mr. Clean stands in the way.
Puritanism is no joke. It's the structural fiber of America; it's in our wiring, our anatomy. And, if Freud's right that anatomy is destiny, then we all descend from the Mayflower. Then there is no hope for an aesthetic awakening. We can't overcome Lifton's "psychic numbing" because its ground is puritanism. We are supposed to be sensually numb. That is the fundamental nature of puritan goodness. ...
Yet we each know that nothing so moves the soul as an aesthetic leap of the heart at the sight of a fox in the forest, of
[131]
a lovely open face, the sound of a little melody. Sense, imagination, pleasure, beauty are what the soul longs for, knowing innately that these would be its cure.
Instead our motto is "just say no." And we pass laws to make everything "clean" and "safe"—childproof, tamperproof, fallproof, bugproof. Start each meal with preop prep—iced and chlorinated water to numb the tongue, lips, and palate. ... Laws for order, once the inherent cosmos (the Greek word for aesthetic order) of the world is no longer sensed. This is the promised land, and the laws are still coming down from the hill. Prohibition is the ultimate law of the land. ...
Maybe ranting is one of the last pleasures the mind in extremis can enjoy. So I shall not be stopped. Besides, aesthetics and a therapy of things is also eminently practical. Take our trade war with the Japanese. We believe we have lost out to them because they have better management techniques; because they plan farther ahead; they coordinate better among the bankers, researchers, industrialists, and government; because they work like slaves. These economic reasons don't cut it. There is also an aesthetic reason for their guaranteed quality, which our puritan mind simply cannot even imagine. The Japanese are trained aesthetically early on and live in a culture devoted as much to the chrysanthemum (beauty) as to the sword (efficiency)—to use their symbols.
Japanese people—ordinary people—have hobbies of calligraphy, flower arrangement, dance gesture, paper twisting and cutting. They live in a world of very small detail, which we call quality control. Their eye is trained to notice, their hand to tastefully touch. Watch the sushi chef. Even their language takes immense care. It's aesthetic training that gives them the economic edge, even if they get as drunk as we do and as tired.
Puritanism, not aesthetic pleasure, also runs our prisons, the major social disaster of today. At the Kinsey Library in Indiana, I saw piles of drawings, notebooks, and letters confiscated
[132]
from men in prisons because the material was redolent with erotic fantasies. The material must be taken away from the prisoners because sex in the mind or in art forms is just as bad as sex in action: so says the puritan mind . So instead of imaginative sex, we have buggery, rape,... Wouldn't it be wiser to bring in artists to direct men in elaborating great erotic murals on the walls of the penitentiary, and dancers brought in to form rituals of the body, if these aesthetic therapeutics reduced, by means of beauty, incidents of rape, jealous knifings, and sadistic pleasures in those same bodies behind those same walls?
Exhausted. The towel, the towel! If all this sounds punch-drunk and hardly an adequate replacement for one hundred years of psychotherapy, let it be. Let it stand. That's the point, isn't it—to break old bottles with new wine, strange as it may taste?
Jim
Puritanism ?
Sure. But that's a little too easy.
Here's the thing: total Puritanism and total desublimation both fail as worldviews.
In other words: Follow the symptoms , eh? Total abandon and total denial: both betoken madness.
There is a devil's-advocate quality to this dialogue which is, of course, at once its most valuable and most irritating quality. With not one but two brilliant authors shooting from the hip and pushing hard against received wisdom, we're often railroaded into a facile both-sidesism just to keep our bearings.
Against such a searing backdrop this feels like settling for less, but I think it is the correct response. A life without any hard realities or moral choices would not be any more worth living than a life devoid of beauty . People who have always gotten their way are as intolerable (and dangerous) as those who have been beaten and broken down into little more than caged animals. I have to think that these two gentlemen, of all people, must understand that side of the problem.
So yeah, Puritanism. Puritanism is the proper ism-matic response to certain conditions. As is desublimation to others. "Desublimation" is moving your hand towards the flame. "Puritanism" is the recoil. We're all trying to warm our hands at the same fire, but we don't have perfect control of our extremities, nor control over the assembled crowd, nor the crowd over itself. The crowd can wittingly or unwittingly toss us out into the cold or into the pyre at any moment. Sometimes we lurch to avoid falling in or falling out.
When so-called Puritans declared that sex in the mind or in art forms is just as bad as sex in action , they were not behind the times. Actually they were anticipating a whole lot of "phenomenology" and "cognitive science."
To wit,
if a dream or a delusion or a fixation
could be so overpowering
that
we "experience" (or suffer from) it
as if it were real
;
and/or
if the effects
of the "real" action
and of the "imagined" action
on our outward/observable behavior
are pragmatically indistinguishable
;
and/or
if memory is
slowly but constantly
working itself over
("burnishing"!!)
according to myriad self-serving biases
;
then
the "Puritans" among us
actually
are totally right about
the "..
just as
..." part.
If they go a little heavy on the "... bad ..." part, this certainly poses some vexed social and political questions for an ostensibly pluralistic society; but, contra Hillman above, it does not (or not by itself) disprove the premise at which he takes aim.
"According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean."
(Phenomenology, Stanford EoP)
In short, Puritans aren't entertained by narrative or theatrical fiction. They're just sitting there stone-faced while everyone else is cracking up or crying or getting a boner. That makes them annoying, but it also makes them useful. In theory at least, this kind of person should notice all kinds of things that beauty-struck normies are blind to. Kind of like how gay and straight people can sometimes see each other's relationship issues more clearly than their own. Kind of like how the very old, the very young, and the "neurodivergent" of all ages might just blurt out the unfortunate truth at the worst possible time.
We need to put Mencken's (in)famous definition to bed. Perhaps the Puritans were and are our great noticers, as Neil Postman described the soft-Puritan Lewis Mumford.
How about:
Puritan: "a person who doesn't just have a boner the whole time and doesn't have a compromising "creative class" side-hustle, and therefore is better able to notice how plays, novels and movies affect people and is willing to say what it is."
With this in mind, let's flip back a few pages to Ventura's letter on acting styles...
[107]
...
The Edges of Behavior
Dear Jim,
Norman Mailer once wrote that psychology wouldn't come into its own until it could explain the psyche of the actor. I think he had something there. ...
Maybe the difference between humans and animals is not that humans speak but that humans act . ... as though to act (as in action) is
[108]
also to act (as in acting). And then there's that psychological catchphrase that's become part of the common tongue: acting out, meaning, to follow through on emotions and thoughts that disrupt your life or someone else's. Acting out is an extraordinary phrase, really: it puts a negative spin on doing anything that involves the more molten parts of your psyche, while implying that such behavior isn't quite real. This implies, in turn, that to be authentic your behavior must be calm and considered. What a fear of disruption lurks in that phrase! ...
Where was I?
The phenomenon of acting as it relates to the phenomenon of psychology. Through varying degrees of effort and mistake we partly discover , partly invent not who but how we are—our roles. Then we play that part, some days poorly and some days well, for all it's worth and for as long as we can get away with it, until we're forced to change. "Getting your act together" is so central to our being that it's possible to dispense with psychological jargon and describe the crises of our lives purely in theatrical terms. The role doesn't work anymore, our timing's off, we can't say the old lines or even remember them, or they don't fit the scene anymore. We're too young or too old to play this part, too fat or too wasted. ... A woman is sick of being typecast as a mother, a man can't act out his vulnerability. ... We expect from each other a certain level and consistency of acting. Rewrites and improvisations are not often welcome. Reject your lines totally: "catatonia." Put in wildly different dialogue: "schizophrenia." No one, least of all yourself, takes the part that you play lightly.
[109]
So if the art of acting in a culture changes drastically—if, that is, there's a fundamental change in the behavior we use to portray behavior—wouldn't that be an event of enormous psychological significance, with all sorts of ramifications for the practice of psychotherapy? That's what happened in America in the late 1940s, though deep thinkers in psychology and elsewhere didn't take much note at the time.
To comment on the changes at that time we have to make some distinctions among acting styles. Acting takes three basic forms, the most common of which is shtick. ... Most TV and film, and all the commercials, display a kind of puppetry: no matter what the stimuli, schtick actors get by with two or three smiles, one expression of chagrin, one of sadness, and a grab bag of grimaces. It looks and feels like nothing, and it's supposed to. Such acting is meant to be absolutely nonthreatening: enter, charm, sell, exit. ... Shtick acting is just a party mask. The fact that people choose to watch so much of it now is something for psychotherapy to ponder, but the style itself can't tell us much.
I'll call the second form of acting concrete or outer acting. This was the dominant form of acting in England and America for the first half of this century, and it remains so in England (as on "Masterpiece Theater"). It is the acting that made the old Hollywood star system great, and it is still done with mastery here by a few artists... These are people who mastered an enormous repertoire of behavior and could produce the most delicate shadings on cue. ... Even people acting in this style who, like John Wayne, didn't have a large range, still had total mastery of the gradations within their range, so that (like Wayne in Rio Bravo or The Searchers) they worked marvelous subtleties into their characters.
[110]
The third form I'll call abstract or inner acting. (As I said in another letter, this took hold in America when painting and jazz were moving in the same direction.) If the concrete actor is like the classical musician, the abstract actor is like the jazz player. The technical demands are just as great, but the technique is used differently. To see the difference starkly, rent yourself double features of Laurence Olivier and Montgomery Clift, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn and Gena Rowlands. They perform equally well, but with different objectives. An Olivier or a Hepburn will project their roles at you as precisely as a laser, focusing on a moment's absolute center; Clift or Rowlands will play the same moment at its edge. Olivier or Hepburn will play the moment where it's most itself, where it is that moment and no other; Clift or Rowlands will play the moment at the border, where it's begun to change into something else.
Each style, the concrete and the abstract, embodies an entirely different experience of personality. The older, concrete style expresses fixity: no matter how much characters may change in a movie like Gone with the Wind, it's their behavior rather than their essential psychology that's at stake. Their relation to the story changes, but they don't, not really. While characters played in the abstract style... sometimes seem to be registering major changes every minute . At any given time in the story their characters seem able to go off in many directions; they seem to include several, often contradictory, motivations in the same line of dialogue. Such a performance gives ambiguity to even a very concrete story ...
It's a style that tells nothing yet reveals all. It tells nothing, in that its interest is in the ambiguity and paradoxes of human behavior. Yet it reveals all, in that the character seems to leap from one area of the psyche to another in the same scene, often in the same line. ...
[111]
...
So our culture shifted , in its serious acting ( the behavior we use to portray behavior ), from the style of James Cagney and Katharine Hepburn to the style of Marlon Brando and Gena Rowlands; from fixity to flux ; from clarity to paradox . Cagney could summarize his style brilliantly and simply, as he did: "You walk in, plant yourself, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth." Compare that to what Ellen Barkin (who does a fine, earthy rendition of the inner style) said of Marion Brando: "When he's up there he's telling a secret about himself that's not for sale." Cagney tells the truth, Brando tells a secret.
As psychotherapists would be the first to observe, there's all the difference in the world between truths and secrets . Something claiming to be a truth is taking a definite stance in relation to a shared reality ; but a secret may not be "true" in any sense of the word , a secret may be a lie or wish or a dream. And the stance of a secret toward shared reality is clear: secrets don't trust it. As I said in an earlier letter, a stance of suspicion toward the outer world is taken for granted in the Actors Studio style. Where Bette Davis and Clark Gable walk into a room as though they're expecting to take it over, Paul Newman and Warren Beatty (even in roles that call for great authority) walk into a room as though they're expecting to have to leave, and very soon too.
Date the shift from Brando's 1947 performance in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, under the direction of Elia Kazan (though the styles of Brando and Clift were already formed by then). The next year Kazan and Lee Strasberg founded the Actors Studio, where the new style flourished. Is
[112]
it enough to say that this generation of actors was the first to grow up wholly in the technological world that followed the Great War, the world of movies, radio, telephones, airplanes, and cars? And that they hit their adolescence during the Depression and came of age during World War Two? Perhaps. But perhaps, too, the effect isn't so much causal (developmental) as simultaneous .
Consider, Jim: it usually goes unnoticed that technology is an expression before it's a cause . All these inventions began as human expressions, just as poems and songs and psychological theories are human expressions. The inventions of technology emerged from the human psyche before they affected the human psyche. So we don't really know if the fragmented experience of personality expressed by these actors was caused by a technological environment or if technology itself was one symptom of a change in the collective psyche that was experienced individually as fragmentation.
Take this a little further:
We can say with some certainty that the popularity of the Actors Studio style (method was always too rigid a word) should have taught therapists something. America began identifying enthusiastically, and in large numbers, with a sense of personality that had no center and with portrayals that could easily be diagnosed as neurotic, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and psychotic—in the late forties and early fifties! In other words, before there was a television in every home, before the dominance of Madison Avenue ads, before rock 'n' roll, before the civil rights movement, before permissive childrearing, before the sixties, before Vietnam, before feminism, before the collapse of American manufacturing, before everything that gets blamed for our ills. What the art of acting tells us is that our sense of psychological fragmentation didn't follow these developments, it preceded them .
...
What exactly
precededthis
neurotic, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and psychoticturn
if it was not
in fact
preceded bytelevisionor
feminismbut rather
followed by them
?
What preceded was the "long nineteenth century."
Hillman, later in the book:
you can't use your therapist as solace and as retreat. And your therapist can't use you. The three big diagnostic terms that you hear thrown around now are codependency, addiction, and narcissism. We know from the new literary criticism, deconstruction, that any descriptions you use are always descriptions of the reader, not of the text. They are readers' self-descriptions. In the same way, those diagnostic terms are analysts talking about their conditions: that they are codependent, in therapy; that they are addicted and can't stop; and that they are involved in a narcissistic activity, which is called countertransference—they keep examining themselves about how they're feeling about their patients.
(p. 220)
A similar line with less of an axe to grind:
"Many propose that we need more public conversations about mental health and are urging individuals to prioritize and advocate for their own well-being. Though such guidance is well intentioned, asking Americans to spend more time thinking and talking about their mental health may actually be part of the problem. ... We need a different approach, one that encourages more outward-focused action and less inward-focused talk.
...
"Outward action focused on other people is likely the most powerful tool individuals can use to improve their own mental health. ... Meeting the need to belong requires outward action, engaging in activities that positively affect the lives of other people."
Outward Action Is Good for Your Brain:
We can help solve our mental health crisis
by getting out of our own heads
CLAY ROUTLEDGE
AUG 16, 2023
The nineteenth century (even the long one) didn't have cinema or television, but all the same its literary productions certainly were thought to traffic in la vie interieure.
Similarly Mauceri, in what may be the only useful insight in his entire polemic, argues that
"movies can be seen as an expression
of what music was already doing
in people's minds."
(The War On Music, p. 112)
Of course I am chasing something very clever but highly irresponsible here: a cosmic-scale takeaway from some eclectic cherrypicking. I have always been trapped a bit too far inside my own head to be fit for either full social adjustment or "responsible" scholarship. But anyway, what I want to suggest is that, indeed, technology and psychology may simply be both carrot and stick vis-a-vis each other; BUT readerly projection-upon-text and in-your-own-head-ism are essential and timeless. Technology did not give us something new but rather gave us too much of something we previously had not enough of. The endemic metabolic risk was once starvation; now it is obesity. Similarly, the external environment upon which the "reader" projects self-descriptions once consisted of that which they could make with their own hands and that which the Earth could provide in the cursory run of things; whereas now we are veritably surrounded by graven images of everything ever to exist or be imagined.
The Puritan mistake, then, is once again not quite the mistake it seems to be, and it is a forgivable mistake which leaves the deeper insight untouched. Namely, the Puritan theory of Media Effects is too "strong." It is too facile and one-to-one. But it is not too facile in equating "sex in the mind" with "sex in action." To the contrary, it is us thoroughgoing materialists who have been forced to deny this mind-action parallelism unless and until a materialistic basis was found for it; and so now, being presented with precisely this basis, the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Perhaps not merely sex but just about anything fraught in the mind or in art forms really is just as bad (so to speak!) as the real action specifically when we are too far inside our own heads, when we have too much dead time to work it over in will and memory. Of course it may not really be "bad" at all in and of itself; but the question becomes, given the chance to churn it over in memory, what cannot turn bad this way? And what better to set off a cascade of "inward-focused talk" than a pungent literary or cinematic image?
Indeed, to hear some artists and critics tell it, that is the whole point of the literary and representational arts. If that is so, then these arts truly are drugs; and at that, "death drugs" as against the "life drugs" of various "musics": the aural of course, but also the visual and the kinesthetic. Now, I have endorsed Mauceri's view that people just plain put stories to music, come what will. I have no choice; I can't confirm that I know personally a single other person besides myself who doesn't do this. The manner and content of projection can take many forms, reflecting (one would think) just about anything and everything else that might be going on in the world. The death-spiral of inwardness is never inevitable but it is a constant danger.
Just remember Hillman's ultrathin gloss on deconstruction:
any descriptions you use
are always descriptions of the reader,
not of the text
.
Honestly I wouldn't even know if any name-brand "deconstructionist" ever said that or anything like it; but it certainly comports with just about everything else I have been reading and thinking about over the past several years.
Puritanism would much rather focus on
hard realities and moral choices
that you have to suffer through and work for.
Yep, sounds terrible. But N.B., hard realities betokens a decisive "turning outward."
Reality imposes itself from without. It is not a choice. That is why everyone needs some of it; hopefully the right amount, and hopefully not only this. But without any of it we become unbalanced, and not only in the highly visible manner of people who always get their way; perhaps we also become unbalanced because we have too much of the wrong kind of inner life, continuously churning over experience without any externally-imposed reality checks to keep us from becoming "narcissistic." Again, I am merely describing in a skeptical tone what is often rendered quite joyfully by literary types.
But I have also said that Puritan media theory is too facile. Certainly I would venture that very few, even among the severely distrurbed, end up believing that the events in a novel or a movie actually happened. It was never my point to suggest a breakdown of the boundary between reality and fantasy. That is a bit of sideshow, if it is relevant at all.
If you are just mildly "puritanical" in temperament as I am, perhaps you have also had the thought that cosplayers, e.g., have got nothing on the supposedly hardheaded academics who will unflinchingly cite a literary character or scenario to cinch the crux of their whole hardheaded argument when any mundane piece of social science would have sufficed. That is a clinical-level boundary-breakdown as far as I'm concerned, but because it is mutually supported and validated by a vast "community" safety net of fellow academics, critics, artists, and audiences, it rarely has any severe psychological consequences. It keeps the litterateur straight, actually, to bask in the warmth of likemindedness, just so long as "reality" doesn't intercede. It keeps everyone around the fire together, just close enough to stay toasty warm. Rank, if he could put his own literariness aside, might say that this literary epistemology is "true" but not "real." Becker might say that any party to this communal delusion is "as good as dead" if they should lose either the community or the illusion. I can't imagine it happens very much, and I'm not wishing it would happen more, but I think it will happen a lot more in the coming decades barring some drastic change of technological course. Keep your eyes peeled.
A facile example that I've heard a lot about (though of course I haven't seen the show!) is the furore over HBO's portrayal of Jerry West.
"West's lawyers said HBO's disclaimer
that the series is a dramatization
does not insulate the network from liability."
For normies, these sorts of dustups are all about precedent. This kind of artistic license is, unfortunately, a proxy for all free speech issues, at which point there's not much to be done about it. It's a cowardly and immoral use of a fundamental right. It's difficult to take aim at the coward without jeopardizing the right.
For latent puritans there is a more interesting (and actionable) side to this, and perhaps some schadenfreude. Mozart cannot dispute his depiction in Amadeus because he is too long dead. Only academics can do this on his behalf, and they tend to be too corpselike themselves to convince much of anyone even in spite of very good evidence. But Jerry West and "his family" are every bit as alive as his self-appointed "dramatizers." This hastens the sort of intercession of "reality" that can very quickly and rudely un-dissociate the dissocitators. Under crushing internal and external pressure to be topical at all times and in all things, Entertainment is flying ever closer to the sun in this respect. I expect an increase in meltage.
Definitionally, fiction is not "real." We don't need to relitigate this definition of terms. Rather, we must notice that when questions of real-ism or of natural-ism become the focus, we most likely have slipped back into discussing texts rather than audiences. Audiences are not mere dupes of the text, but they are having a "real" experience when they enter the Dream Factory. Perhaps this is so obvious as to be meaningless. I'm not sure it is so obvious right now to anyone who doesn't read a lot of heady nonfiction.
The point is that what I have variously called projection, churning, working over, this does happen to all our memories of aesthetic experience as well as to our memories of lived experience. The output is less "real" than the input; it becomes less and less real the more we burnish it; and yes, I do have to wonder if the literary and cinematic content does not in fact become ever more seemlessly blended in with the lived content as time passes.
It seems fair to speculate, also, that what technology has done, in media as in pharmacology, is given us ever more concentrated, powerful, multifarious drugs. It has given us a lot to think about that we not only didn't think about before but couldn't even imagine at all. That means more churning; it means a stronger guilt-induced illusion that we are describing the "text" rather than ourselves; and it is not hard to imagine, if what I'm saying is anywhere in the ballpark, that this cannot help but converge upon a "narcissistic" feedback loop.
Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression: A Sociological Analysis
(1968)
[169]
...it is suggested that the branch of the Christian tradition which has most strongly emphasized orientations toward individualistic universalism and activism—namely, Puritanism—has produced motivations particularly favorable to the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism.
The radical elimination (going beyond the Judaic prohibition of graven images) of all visible nature as the subject matter of artistic expression is congruent with the Puritan "repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh." A reconciliation of this moral principle—which has been thought to be "absolutely opposed" to artistic expression—with an emergent aesthetic interest requires either an "uglification" of the flesh in its various forms or its rejection as subject matter. Both courses have been taken in American art; the first tendency appears to be stronger in literature, and the second in painting. Although tendencies toward ugliness have been discerned in the form and color preferences of leading abstract expressionists, the abolition of content has made it possible not only to reconcile an underlying moral attitude with an emergent artistic interest, but also to do this without obvious distortion of tangible reality—namely, by renouncing the latter.
A renunciation of tangible reality, rather than its "uglification" is, in fact, more consistent with the Puritan campaign against "the dependence on external things." Protest art—and paintings in the tradition of figurative expressionism may be included here—is still dependent, although negatively, on "external things," against the falsity or futility of which it protests. But abstract art, which has achieved
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independence from "external things," is in this respect characterized by a more radical adherence to the very abstract moral principle of Puritanism. It is important that not only human subject matter is excluded—which could be accounted for by a neutral conception of human nature—but all tangible subject matter as well.
... Weber's paraphrase of Washington Irving, to the effect that Puritanism, precisely because of its ascetic restraint, "evinces less play of fancy, but more power of the imagination," applies well to the painters of the abstract expressionist school. ...
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...
Finally, the analogy may be stressed between the Puritan revolt against established tradition and "the Abstract Expressionists' renunciation of traditional authority": abstract expressionism is a "form of painting which is motivated by a spirit of revolt, ... a style whose most profound commitment is to remain disaffected . . . from style itself." "Expressionism," in general, "is the art of the individual and of his protest against the restraints of society"—a protest also represented by the original Reformation.
The Protestant idea that everyone can worship God directly is congruent with the assumption (which became attached to abstract expressionism as a socioartistic movement) that everyone can paint, without art-school training, for self-expression.
Thus, within the general framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Puritanism has emphasized certain elements which, even though they may not have been its immediate inspiration, are congruent with some of the most significant features of abstract expressionism. It is notable that abstract expressionism was developed in the one advanced industrial society which was probably most influenced by Puritanism.
While the romantic tradition intervened to modify the impact of the secularized value orientations of Puritanism on
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abstract expressionist art (and may be responsible for its more sensuous features), enough evidence has been presented to support the hypothesis that, in one of its sociological aspects, abstract expressionism can be seen as a phase of the working-out of the effects of Puritanism on Western civilization.
I conceive of abstract expressionism as an art style supplied with much of its motivation by a secularized Puritan tradition that has been reconciled with a growing artistic interest and reactivated by a new, but nonspecific and non-denominational, religious urgency.
It may be suggested that it is because of the congruence of some of the basic value orientations forged by Puritanism and abstract expressionism that the latter became the first domestically produced art style which both generated intense and widespread interest in the American society and brought forth the first internationally significant artistic expression of American society. It also contributed to a reconciliation of the still largely puritan, although secularized, dominant stream of American culture with art. It was a creative achievement, of the first order, not only as a form of artistic expression, but also as a focus of sociocultural integration.
Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
the motor theory of perception, which means that motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system. As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions
GEORGE LAKOFF
"What Orwell Didn't Know About the Brain, the Mind, and Language"
Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change:... Brains change as you use them—even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.
Thought is physical in another way. It uses the brain's sensory-motor system. Imagining moving uses the same regions of the brain as moving; imagining seeing uses the same regions of the brain as seeing. Meaning is mental simulation,... Mental simulation, like most thought, is mostly unconscious.
Gilbert Rose
Between Couch and Piano
(2004)
[127]
... Like poetry, the affective power of music most likely has its origins in the infant's earliest vocal experience of the mother. Not that vocal experience can ever be simply vocal: the attributes of mother's voice are indistinguishable from her touch and movement; all become fixed in the rhythm of the baby's body and comprise a rich medley of sensorimotor and affectomotor components, linking mother and infant prior to the latter's differentiation.
The sensorimotor and affectomotor components of music are likewise indistinguishable. The affectomotor response to music comprises many physical concomitants of affects or preverbal affect precursors — tactile, kinesthetic, rhythmic, respiratory. ...
Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould and other instrumentalists were famous for being hardly able to restrain their singing accompaniment to the music they were performing; they seemed merged with it. It is possible that for them, explicitly, as for others in the audience of music, less overt and more implicitly, the interaction with the music becomes itself internalized as a more or less silent and perhaps enduring affective presence.
... A review article on developments in neuroscience cites the
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prevailing consensus that current perception requires comparisons with the past:
The separate features of the environment stimulate particular patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. The brain does not perceive the external environment, nor the separate stimulus features. Rather, the brain recognises the patterns of neuronal activation within the brain itself. For perception to occur, the brain searches for a match between the current pattern of neuronal activation and patterns stored in memory from prior experience . . . . The brain . . . makes a quick assessment of just enough details to find a "good enough match." When a "good enough" match is found, perception occurs. (Pally, 1997: 1025)How well this "matches" Freud's repeated assertions (in the 1895 "Project" (pp. 327-330) and the "Dream Book" (1900-1901: 565-567)), foreshadowing the following:
All presentations originate from perceptions and are repetitions of them. The antithesis between subjective and objective . . . . only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object. The reproduction of a perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements . . . . A precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.(Freud, 1925a: 237-238)
As we have repeatedly discussed, the "good enough" match between the virtual tension and release dynamic of art (music) on the one hand and affect on the other, recalls early affective attunements and stimulates affective resonance; the underlying concordance between art and affect may be so close that it leads to a preconscious illusion that one's emotional responsiveness to art is mutual and
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reciprocated, that is, that music itself is a witnessing presence. This facilitates further affectomotor responsiveness.
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