Rank—Art and Artist (viii)—Partiality and Totality

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

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[100] I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him, emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions

in contrast to Freud,

who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow.

I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense —can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest "technical" work by the unreality of the analytical situation.

To understand the work of art in its specific import, then, we have not only to advance, in our search for an explanation of creative imagination, from the wish fulfilment theory to will-psychology, but also to get hold of the negative aspect of the immortality-ideology in the fear-problem of the neurotic.

Now, I have always regarded the neurotic as a failed artist . In other words, to the eternalizing tendency of the individual will...there must be superadded a particular kind of overcoming of fear; and this we can certainly study better in the
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failed neurotic with his thwarted productivity than in the creative artist. For the artist overcomes this isolating fear socially , by getting society's sanction for his personal immorality-symbolism,

Society ? Or community?

If "society" and "community" can be differentiated, then sanctioning mechanisms must then also be distinguished; ditto the prospects and effectiveness of socially overcoming an isolating fear .

The most persistent problem in applying Rank's insights to the present day is that most of us artists do not get much sanction at all, and yet we persist anyway, often unhappily but doggedly all the same. To the extent that we are unhappy, a Rankian finds everything to be in order, more or less as Rank left it. But we find least sanction of all from society , and yet we persist. Could it be that we are seeking that sanction from somewhere, something, someone else?

There are good reasons not to take artists seriously when they claim precisely this. That said, what are the superior alternative explanations?

I don't mean to be too coy here, though I am being a bit coy for rhetorical effect. I tend to think that there is no God and no "society." And yet I am an "artist," I intend to remain one until the wheels fall off, and I did begin to catch myself sanction-seeking in unguarded moments, early and often in this journey. It was in precisely these realizations that the preoccupation of this blog with unfashionable things like "morality," "puritanism," "abstraction," and "individualism" had its genesis.

If an artist is both an atheist and an "ontological nominalist," then, any sanction-seeking cannot really be "religious" in any legitimate sense. What I sense within myself is that it is, ideally, a sort of displacement of the "ontological realist" conception of "society." One takes account of that side of things, certainly, but it makes no sense to seek sanction from some entity that one believes not to exist, at least not as any real "entity." There is no way to render this in words without giving the impression that it amounts, in the end, merely to some kind of denial or mind-trick. I don't think that's quite what it is. Really it's very basic: you write or play what you feel, and then you see who is interested, if anyone is. You would just love it if everyone thought you were a genius; but if they quite obviously don't, this does not dissuade you from pursuing something that is much more deeply felt than any such "social" epiphenomenon could be. That's it! It's what self-appointed evangelists of popular taste refer to as "self-indulgence." They are the first to notice, too, that there is far more renunciation than indulgence happening here, but this contradiction does not seem to trouble them too much.

This is, in other words, exactly what you would expect of a person who is, for whatever reason, an "ontological nominalist" to the bone, but who has (for whatever reason!) been thrust unwillingly into a terrifyingly large social world of billions of "ontological realists" and all of their various "realist" conceits. Supek, whose terminology I am relying upon here until I can scrounge up something better, names as the lineage of "ontological realism": "romantic philosophy"; Hegel and Schelling; Lazarus and Steinthal; Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim; finally (and jarringly!), "totalitarian doctrines of the fascist and Stalinist varieties."

For now, though I have some of the wrong allies, I'm happy enough to have some of the right enemies too!

whereas the neurotic fails to overcome his mortal fear because he has nothing to compensate it, either individually (in love), collectively (in religion), or, least of all, socially.

Again, though there is by this point in the argument a danger of overvaluing community as against society, this last bit does suggest that the specifically social compensations which elude the neurotic, those which elude him in abstract, impersonal "society," are those which must be achieved rather than ascribed. Rank has just described the creative artist as getting society's sanction . Sanction must be got rather than given, and the neurotic has trouble getting some. Hence the much remarked-upon correlation of "neurotic" suffering with the dispersion of community into society and the concurrent loss of those compensations attaching to rootedness in a community. Hence also the need of art and artist both to escape from community into society in order to have the chance of winning compensation rather than being given it (which in fact does nothing for the artist).

Of course art after the end of society does come out of this sketch looking like a solution in search of a problem, a matter which must be faced up to eventually, somehow.

Now, the study of neurotic fear, in whatever form we encounter it, cannot be handled and explained as a problem of reality, but at bottom represents an irrational phenomenon. Herein, incidentally, lies the very pardonable error of the Worringer concept of fear , which is far too realist to explain the abstract urge to art. For external fear no more leads to compensatory artistic activity than the real sex-impulse does so. ...

Fear is, in contrast to fright, not a real phenomenon: it cannot be traced to and explained (as psycho-analysis has attempted to explain it) by any real danger, even such an internal danger as one might postulate, for example, in the individual's own insistent impulses (Freud).

For every adequate cause of fear that we find, without or within, merely gives it the impress of fright, without touching the prime phenomenon of human fear of the unreal and irrational. Indeed, the linking of this prime fear even with the notion of death—unreal as this must be to our ignorance, and peculiarly close as it stands to the prime fear—seems a sort of tacking-on by way of afterthought.

The prime phenomenon itself I characterized in another connection...as "life-fear," because seemingly it is something given along with the life-
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process itself and working against the individual's fear of losing himself in life.

In so far, therefore, as the negative-inhibitive fear of life, as well as the positive will to perpetuation, acts in the creation of ideologies (including artistic ideologies), we have to deal with a second unreal factor.

To put it in another way, the fear that urges toward perpetuity is precisely as unreal —or, shall we say, illusory or fantastic —as the positive will-to-art that builds up for itself a second reality next above, parallel with, or inside the first.

But neither of these two tendencies alone is capable of constructing an ideology, be it of a religious, an artistic, or a social character; it requires the two together , cooperating according to the needs of the moment, to do that. Yet they are not one, they are not causally connected in a such a way that the fear of death leads to the will to eternalization, or the complete achievement of the will to eternalization leads to the fear of life.

This may seem to happen, or actually happen, even at a later stage in that which I have called the creative sense of guilt; but also it may only emerge from the attempt to overcome this fundamental dualism in the individual. Originally
the positive will to eternalization
seems to have led by itself only to actions of
a predominantly magical order
which, in the course of ritual development, became
pre-artistic expressions of a "practical" sort
(dance, and eventually instrumental music and song), while the
restraining fear
led solely to
magical hush-ceremonies
which we meet later in religious (like neurotic) ceremonial.

Only a combination of the two—in other words, a volitional grip on, and conquest of, the fear-phenomenon—leads to the creation of ideologies in which the will to eternalization satisfies itself (in the first instance) collectively, and individual fear is suspended or at least temporarily mitigated. Yet not only is the unreal character of these ideologies obvious, but (after what has been said) their unreal origin also: that is, the unreal motivation which they have in the individual.

Thus, at the very commencement of human development—
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then, indeed, in far greater measure than subsequently—we have the unreal element as the decisive factor which led to expression in art. But if religion is originally unreal , and the (psychologically speaking) equivalent love-experience at the other end of the scale is predominantly real , art stands in the middle, realizing the unreal and rendering it concrete. In so doing, it merely follows a universal law of development which I have formulated in my Seelenglaube und Psychologie: namely, that human development consists in a continuously progressive concretization of phenomena that were originally purely ideal or spiritual . In this sense the whole of cultural development is an artistic, or at least artificial, attempt to objectify human ideologies.

Tough to say concisely just what this theory of progressive concretization does and does not have going for it at today's late(r) date. It's easy enough to see that Western art gave rise to plenty of its own strictly ideal cognitions, and that these have indeed enjoyed their brief, wild rides on the concretization treadmill.

e.g. If the cinema has origins in the novel, then the cinema also is far more "concrete" than the novel. The cinema "concretizes" much which the novel necessarily leaves underdetermined.

The same applies to Mauceri's thought that, "Movies can be seen as an expression of what music was already doing in people's minds." It applies doubly, actually, since music "already" was far more "abstract" than any literature.

Beyond that?

There is a larger (enormous) project to be undertaken here, sifting in detail through the transition from "idealist" to "analytic" philosophical writing on art, and concurrently following the life-and-times of those various ideals which have stubbornly refused to go quietly into the proverbial dustbin. I suspect there are a few notable examples of such ideals living on in the concrete world, if not precisely to escape debunking by analytic philsophers (as if those writers exerted any real influence), then certainly as a re-form-ation into some (literal) object, an object which is more immune to debunking precisely because it has become concrete and has therefore exited the realm of abstract reason; an object now hiding out in the arena of practical application (purportedly), or perhaps merely amongst other chunks of rock in some ornamental rock garden to which no one pays much attention. Of course I am thinking of the various moral uplift conceits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the one hand, and Baby Mozart records on the other; but I would bet that there are plenty of other examples, if only my purview were a bit wider. (What about all the t-shirts that say things like, "BE A KIND HUMAN"? That seems the best example of all of a process of ever-ongoing aesthetic concretization which ends in ambiguity, at best, or perhaps in outright self-contradiction. It's not very nice to show up to a gathering wearing one of those shirts!)

Nevertheless, art does stand out from the general line of development by the fact that it retains a substantial element of the original unreal character.

Oh, really? Doesn't that all depend on what art is imitative of?

Previously . . .

"[Art's] "aim" was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it, and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form— that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible, not reality, but unreality. Thus we can detect both the imitative instinct of artistic creativity and the practical aimlessness of art even in these primitive stages. The imitation, however, concerns the unreal, which later becomes steadily more naturalized and humanized, while the aimlessness concerns reality—a fact which æsthetics has, strangely enough, inverted...

I fear that any riff on the above is bound to be far too abstract (no pun intended) to be worthwhile. To be as basic as possible about it: already by Rank's own time, it was no longer a safe assumption that all art would continue to be progressively naturalized and humanized . Those -izeds are not interchangeable with concretized . Not even close.

It's tough to say for sure where Rank's own aesthetic sympathies lie. That is a positive feature of the book, to be sure. It is not a detriment. There are, in any case, occasional flashes of contempt shown for modern art, and they do burst the bounds of the merely incidental rhetoric involved in carrying out a lengthy and subtle argument. This does lead me to believe, although Rank sometimes seems to have thought of everything, that he did not take seriously enough the possibility of a truly non-representational art; and while it's easy enough to understand how this could happen to someone who simply never came in contact with such art, it is less understandable as long as music is considered to land among the arts, as one would expect it must for a Viennese of Rank's generation.

A simpler tell is that Rank has some unfortunate company in finding residual un-reality retained in modern art: that is the standard knee-jerk criticism of weekend gallery-goers who expected landscapes and fruit bowls but were confronted instead by monochromes and "action paintings," the latter seeming ultimately "unreal" only because they are made slave to the former expectations. Those expectations have been projected, indiscriminately, and then the stimulus du jour has been mistaken for representational content that is really unreal.

This observation may be out of line here, since full-on abstractionism was still very new as Rank was writing here. It did not lie in the future, though, in music! And yet that is not how music was understood by very many people at this time, or not yet. When works began to appear which demonstrated, for lack of a better way of putting it, abstractionism in reality, and in the terms of the time-and-place such that this was in fact a reasonable takeaway, all of this was simply denied and the various ascriptions of "unreality" trotted out, again and again. It would be better, then, to say that it was reception which more truly retained a substantial element of the original unreal character on which it had always come to rest. It is audiences and critics who have continued to insist on the reality of all sorts of wildly unreal ascriptions and "interpretations" when confronted with "visual music" and "sound sculptures." A few artists had begun, self-consciously and deliberately, to take a step back from the trappings of progressive concretization and present something that is ultimately "concrete" but, at the same time, not "imitative." By abstaining from depiction or representation or figuration or visual "reality" or . . . call it what you will, these artists broke not just with the conventions of "realism" or "naturalism" or "concretization" but also with the residual "unreality" of tribal and religious "seelisch" stuff.

I fear that this, then, is another uncharacteristically "mechanistic" moment in this book, wherein Rank persists in a teleology that already had a few cracks in it. That teleology will never entirely fall apart, now that it has gotten started, because people can (and they should!) see or hear what they will; most likely, they will see or hear some-thing rather than no-thing, lurking in the soulish realm, stilly "animating" the painting or the symphony. It will be (and it must be!) left to audiences to decide just how much "reality" they can handle.

Indeed, in certain artistic tendencies, and, for that matter, in its general development, it even emphasizes the unreal and spiritual element in contrast to this universal concretization-tendency and tries to protect itself against being pulled down to the levels of actual use .

True enough, and all for the better! But the problem remains that it is not necessary to emphasize the unreal in order to protect against mere use . As the kids say, what if things get too real? This has much the same effect!

Again I am at risk of warping the timeline, since Pollack and Rothko lie decades ahead in the future; but let's jump forward anyway, and then let's ask: what is so "unreal" here? The better term might be "a-real" rather than "un-real," but even then we are trapped in representation. We have not yet escaped to Kivy's "decorative" arena. (And yes, "decoration" certainly is a "use," but it is a use to which this kind of painting (and music, and . . . ) is actually well-suited. This is what it's for. And "decoration" is at least as universal a need as "story" or "ritual," no?)

Herein, we may fairly say, lies one of the motives for the æsthetic theory of the "purposelessness" of art: art in fact should represent this unreal ideality in an increasingly concretized world ; while, on the other hand, the imitative principle (as we shall see) appears as a reaction of the creative sense of guilt , driving the individual out of his unreal world and back to nature.

This theory of purposelessness is more or less my own. Who cares if it is quite as universally true as Rank says? Circumstance and temperament have conspired to deliver me there in any event, and at that point it doesn't much matter to me whether the theory can be extrapolated to entire epochs or milieus.

This theory of the creative sense of guilt is also tantalizing, but it is not my own, and so it is all the more glaring, to me at least, that it's validation too would require a kind and degree of emprirical support which seems permanently out of reach.

Throughout the steady concretization-process of the super-real ideologies—which become ever more earthly and end by actually humanizing the creative god in the artist—art conserves the irrational principle which finds expression in the individual creative will on the one hand and the æsthetic immortality-concept on the other.

It refuses to conserve the human being by imitating nature and man;

neither does it console by offering substitutes for what is unattainable or has been renounced, in reality:

what it seeks is to prove by objectification the emotional reality of what has never been real and can never
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be made real .

This psychic actuality is not, however (as analysis would have it), a precipatate of the real , but an idealism a priori anchored beyond all reality , which the will to eternalize objectifies in the artistic immortality-concept.

We seem headed here, finally, for the realization that absolute art hardly represents an escape from idealism per se; rather, this absolute idealism (what else to call it?) simply runs its course only on one side of the artist-audience transaction, in complete opacity ("anchored beyond reality") to the audience; and of course the same goes for the audience's own various "idealisms," which the artist can in no way foresee.

Of course this is not what Rank says here. He says something which is oblique to the old philosophical problem of intentionality in art. What he does do, in taking aim at analysis as the closest-at-hand proxy, is to attempt to describe the state of things before any mere "intention" has been formed at all. That is very ambitious! Seems correct to me, though! Whad'ya want?!

This specifically artistic immortality-ideology renders its creator immortal along with his work, by putting, on a work which expesses the prevailing collective ideology , the stamp of the individual artist-personality . This intermediate character of the work of art, which links the world of subjective unreality with that of objective reality — harmoniously fusing the edges of each without confusing them—has been superbly turned to account by the play-instinct , as Schiller æsthetically conceived it.

The only question is whether the æsthetic play-instinct, which transfers a conception taken from play to art and artistic productivity, really produces the latter or merely accounts for its pleasurable effect

For play, after all, differs not only conceptually, but factually, from art. It has in common with art the combination of the real and the apparent; yet it is not merely fancy objectivized , but fancy translated into reality , acted and lived. It shares with art the double consciousness of appearance and reality, yet it has more of reality , while art is content with the appearance .

Here we are reminded of Plato's definition, or, rather, poetic description, of art—which is really but the reflection of his whole picture of life;

for does he not explain daily life as the shadow of an actual reality, which he calls the Idea,

and does not art therefore naturally represent for him only a shadow of that shadow, a copy of a copy?

Had he meant that this artificial image of our shadow reality might have caught something of the original idea underlying it in the process, his conception would be so far removed from his ascription of an imitative character to art that we should be able to accept that conception.

It would not appear to be so, however. For art to him is imitation, and play, which for the Greeks was such an outstanding cultural factor, he seems to have regarded, quite generally, as just such a copy of real life.

[105]

But as we shall discuss in a later section the origin and significance of human play, as a problem of folk-psychology which is allied to, but by no means identical with, artistic creativity, we will now return to the pleasure-giving character that is common, as it seems, to art and play.

It seems to us that Schiller in his treatise contributed more to this purely æsthetic problem of satisfaction or pleasure than to the problem of artistic creativity proper—particularly in that he was able to regard the notion of the beautiful, which so greatly exercised æsthetic, as the result of the harmonization between the material-instinct and the form-instinct.

But the contemplation of the beautiful aroused pleasure, satisfaction, or liking, and the central problem of scientific æsthetic is to find out why and how this happens .

This, however, takes it for granted that the artist creates the beautiful that thereupon arouses pleasure in the enjoyer, a conclusion which seems an arbitrary assumption based on the effect of the work of art upon us .

In other words, it is assumed in æsthetic that the artist desires to create the beautiful and, in so doing, enjoys a pleasure corresponding to that of the spectator or listener. Yet that is just what we do not know , so that we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it .

Indeed, and yet pretty much everyone seems to (think they) know exactly how all of this works. This is a major source of "illusion" in the world. But what kind of illusion is it?

Is it the kind of illusion that Rank himself says is essential to a sane human existence? (p. 100 above: ". . . the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions . . .")

Or is it a Beckerian "cultural illusion" which will sink us all the moment it (and we) run up against some countervailing piece of "reality?"

The answer can only be: it depends! But we would do well to look out for indications to one or the other effect.

In Psychology and the Soul Rank lands on a certain throwing-back of "psychology" upon "ethics and epistemology." This seems quite the obstacle to simply accepting a given level of endemic "illusion" in (at least) the social world, if less obviously the material one. In other words, one must ask: is precisely this type of "illusion" not what lies at the very root of so many breaches of "ethics and epistemology"? More simply: are we not, in fact, hurting only ourselves this way but rather also hurting others?

This is quite transparently the case with much contemporary "art" and with the chatter, activism and grandstanding surrounding it.

Herein perhaps is to be found the origin of Socrates' ranking of the beautiful on a level with the good and the useful , and of Plato's identification of it with the true —in the sense of his doctrine of Ideas, which leads him to interpret the soul's intuition of a self-beauty as the recollection of its prenatal existence.

Is our man daring to accuse these towering ancients of . . . solipsism?

And so we find the link with our previously outlined explanation of the beauty-concept as a derivative of the soul-concept, and also the relation with the immortality-concept, by bringing the prenatal—that is, a supernatural—state into the account.

Hmm. But "we can only say that we call a work beautiful when we get some pleasure-value or other out of it." If so, then there is nowhere much to go with this particular link but to simply wallow in it by and to ourselves.

The above seems merely a very sophisticated and polite way of leveling the accusation of solipsism against anyone who ever took for granted that their own pleasure-value taken must necessarily be shared in by everyone (anyone) else. And that is why I proudly call myself a Rankian!

At this point we can consider also the psychological
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significance of æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful, whether felt by the artist himself or put into the work by the enjoyer.

In spite of the difference between art and play, there is this element common to both, that they operate on a plane of illusion, which has its setting and its pattern in our own soul-life.

Analysis of the modern human type, moreover, has taught us to understand the emotional life (Gefühlsleben) as such an inner plane of illusion on which all experience is played out more or less potentially, without actual happening (Technik, III).

This provides us in principle with an internal phantom existence without actualized experience , but one in which the individual does not necessarily become conscious of its illusory nature.

It is only by looking at the matter thus that we can understand dream-life as an artificial phantom life on the illusionist plane of the emotions ("life is a dream").

In play and in art the individual is able, by the aid of a collective or social ideology, to find such an illusory plane, whereon he can live potentially or symbolically without doing so in reality .

The pleasure that he finds in this phantom life on an illusory plane lies in the fact that it enables one to avoid the expenditure of real life , which is, basically, in the escape that it provides from life itself and, behind all, from the fear that is inseparable from real life and experience .

Well, okay . . .

If it is indeed the inner plane of illusion on which someone is operating, then all is well and good here. But this very assessment is subject to the same inscrutability as Rank has just finished ascribing to æsthetic judgments. How exactly does social agent A merely observe social agent B, such that the "plane" of B's machinations can be conclusively ascertained?

One answer: via analysis , of course. One can only give Rank the benefit of the doubt on that front; the problem is, this is not (it cannot be) how daily life unfolds. What then?

Freud was the first to recognize the saving of energy as essential to the pleasure derived from wit and, eventually, to all æsthetic pleasure, but his view of energy as libidinous prevented him from extending this conception to the nature of pleasure generally, the purest form of which is, from a philosophical point of view, æsthetic pleasure.

But if, as Schopenhauer
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was perhaps the first to recognize, pleasure is not only nourished from positive sources but may even be just a condition characterized by the absence of fear or guilt, then the belief in the sexual origin of all pleasure... becomes at least questionable.

...in my Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit, ...I suggested that the essence of pleasure lay in a certain brevity , and that of non-pleasure in the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable.

If we combine this factor of temporariness with the quantitative principle of economy, it would seem that pleasure is not only relatively short , but also relatively small —in fact, partial . From this view of æsthetic pleasure we should thus arrive at a general formula: pleasure is the result of a successful "partialization," in which avoidance of fear, which element would necessarily be present in a totality of experience, acts to enhance pleasurable emotions.

Every pleasurable feeling would therefore include, besides positive satisfaction (successful partialization), a being-spared (from fear, totality, life, and so on). And this again brings us to the view that æsthetic pleasure is not sexual , but that, on the other hand, sexual pleasure may also be termed "æsthetic" in so far as it is momentary and partial —two qualities which seem to us to sum up every pleasurable emotional experience.

The greater the economy, the greater the pleasure—provided always that this saving can be made in a relatively short space of time, for the neurotic, too, goes cautiously with life and seeks to conserve vital strength, only he is always saving and his mere hoarding gives him no pleasure.

Æsthetic pleasure is the highest or purest form of pleasure just because it supposes reception and gain , but not giving . But this clearly applies only to the one who enjoys the work of art and not to the creative artist . For him , therefore, a different psychology from the
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æsthetic must be found .

For the artist is also sparing of life in that he substitutes creation ; but then, again, he also wastes as he creates and this brings him new conflicts , from which again he seeks to escape by living.

In this sense all doing and feeling which fall within the province of sublimation , from the purely æsthetic to the simple emotional, would not be substitutes for real life and experience imposed from without —no consequence of deprivation, that is—but the deliberate creation of a plane of illusion , on which there is the possibility of a seeming life, entailing less expenditure and therefore less fear , and therefore again a surplus of pleasure .

Here the theory of the draining-off of superfluous energy in play is inverted: since now it is the play—that is, the attitude of make-believe—that releases forces which are set free by the saving of life.

With this we have found the key to a fundamental problem of life, to understand which is of far-reaching importance also for the psychological and ideological significance of artist and art.

I have discussed this problem of partial and total experience in another connexion (Technik, III): namely, in relation to the hinderance of fear which thwarts the neurotic equally in his life and his work.

The productive aspects of this conflict I was only able to touch upon briefly, but in any case the neurotic presented itself to me as a type predisposed to total experience and hindered only by fear—which to him is also total—from productively and constructively following up this tendency.

The result is, not only that he checks all manifestatons of life because their totality would let loose fear (that is, fear of death), but that the check is excessive (because total), and he only creates more fear, which manifests itself as fear of life.

His only thought, one may say, is to save life and life-force, but this saving brings him no æsthetic pleasure, but neurotic dissatisfaction, because it dreads every sort of spending, even spending on a plane of illusion. From the therapy of such cases it has emerged that the neurotic must first learn to live playfully, illusorily, unreally, on some plane of illusion —first of all on the inner emotional plane .

This is a gift which the artist,
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as an allied type, seems to possess from the outset, and in an even higher degree than the average person possesses it.

It's easy enough to accept that this would have some therapeutic value for the neurotic , ca. 1932. Also that the neurotic would "psychologically speaking represent the artist-type without ever having produced a work of art." (p. xxiv) But does any of this cinch the case for the artist as merely the "productive" type of neurotic?

It does not, not without showing that the artist can become "neurotic" and "unproductive" if deprived of their precious "illusions."

What kinds of "illusions" animate the novelist? The dancer? The concert pianist, or the brothel pianist?

What artist is freer of soulish illusions than the brothel pianist?! And are they any less of an "artist" for it?!

Perhaps we will see, by the end of the book, that some rapprochement is possible between the artist on one hand and reality on the other. It is clear enough all the same that what Rank says here does seem to explain the behavior of certain artists, just not all of them.

For the artist too is a totalist type that, unlike the average, cannot live in perpetual "partialization," but is forced to totalize every act of life.

And on the artistic plane of illusion, in the act of creating—which is at once appearance and reality, a part and a whole —he finds it possible to conquer creatively this fundamental human dualism and to derive pleasure therefrom.

Appearance is far preferable to simple "illusion!" Surface "appearance" is honest and can be known, even if it is necessarily misleading as to the underlying "depths." See:   . . . "ethics and epistemology" . . .

"Appearance" and "illusion" are not interchangeable, though sometimes they get interchange-d.

For when he creates , the artist uses the whole of himself without being in danger of losing that self therein, for it is certain that the work itself , from his point of view, represents only a part of his ego, although it does in fact represent the whole artist and his personality .

It is just, like every good symbol , a pars pro toto solution , in which, however, the artist does not go charily with his life, like the neurotic, but positively spends it as he creates .

This again he does not actually, but essentially—that is, he puts into it his being, his "soul," as we say—and this then stands for the whole living ego, just as the abstract soul in primitive and later immortality-beliefs represents not only the whole individual, but even more than that: his essence, and with it the essence of man and of humanness in general.

Once more we find art expressing the same thing as the abstract-soul concept, only in an objectified form, which we call beautiful precisely in so far as it is unreal , more than earthly.

This explains the "artifact!"

How on earth, then, does LRJ end up setting Black Music in opposition to those Euro-American "artifacts" which objectify the abstract-soul concept ?

The sticking point cannot be so simple as that Black expression "issued from life." Rank is often difficult to follow, but it is crystal clear that this (so far as it goes) is precisely his assumption, too.

Even less can the sticking point be that "Parker did not admit that there was any separation between himself and the agent he had chosen as his means of self-expression." This can be "admitted" or it can be repressed/suppressed, but in any case the very wording of this infamous diatribe speaks quite "separately" of Parker on one hand and his "agent" on the other. That is a particular kind of "illusion," certainly! But then, a different psychology from the æsthetic must always be found if the artist's own mindset is to be understood; the invidious Desmond-Parker comparison reeks of precisely that "arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator" which Rank breaks with as a first order of business.

The unavoidable takeaway is that LRJ is so intent on articulating and preserving some distinctive Black identity that he forbids his protagonists any truck with humanness in general . There is no part-for-whole solution available to them, because they have been excluded (first unwillingly, and now, somehow, quite willingly) from that whole. This all evinces something like "internalized racism" precisely regarding the sorts of issues Rank is interested in here.

For this very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer,

Wait . . . really?!

just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends,

Hmm . . . This identity , all the same, still is properly speaking a semantic element, just like psychological identification . It is just as dependent on more or less direct "semantic" transmission. Thus it's not any easier to believe in the one than the other, even if the most vulgar excesses of interpretation are checked somewhat by the elimination of specifically "psychological" inferences.

Now, Rank says that "this identity...underlies the concept of collective religion." This suggests that great "semantic" precision is made possible by a correspondingly strong "collective" grounding. (Perhaps the "grounding" itself arises from truly "universal" needs? And that is why it is able to become "collective?) I've got nothing hard-and-fast with which to counter that idea, but I often wonder if those of us alive today do not actually overestimate the extent to which bygone "collective elements" veritably railroaded people into near-perfect conformity. Certainly by the time of the first self-conscious fine art, already it seems questionable to assume this kind of conformity, even if conformity must still have been relatively more severe than anything we are accustomed to today.

Or, if the thesis of the "identity of the spiritual" is to be taken as returning us, after all this verbiage, to something ultimately abstract and unreal, something which in fact permits of nothing "semantic" nor even discrete or knowable, well then . . . congratulations! What's time is lunch?

and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance. The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation
[110]
which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through, not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity.

Thus the will-to-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul's tendency to self-eternalization, while the æsthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality.

But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.

[End of Ch. 4]

Rank—Art and Artist (vii)—On Abstraction and Intuition

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

---

Chapter Four
THE PLAY-IMPULSE
AND ÆSTHETIC PLEASURE

...

[91] Worringer has very rightly objected that art has up to now
[92]
been studied far too much from the standpoint of the æsthetic effect of the finished product , in the case of the Classical above all. The catchword of this method of criticism was "intuition (Einfühlung)," a word minted by Theodor Lipps, which, according to Worringer, stops short at the psychology of Classical art. To this intuitive æsthetic of Classical art he opposes the abstraction-character of primitive art , which produces pure style-forms where the craving for "feeling oneself into" leads to naturalism . But valuable as this critical demarcation of the Classical art-feeling may be, Worringer's application of his psychology of style to the problem has not enabled him to grasp the spiritual part played in the forming of style by the individual's urge to artistic creativity.

i.e. To jump ahead a few pages:

abstraction and intuition
are not specifically
characteristic of artistic experience,
but are general psychological attitudes
towards the world
.

... That abstract form is evolved, psychologically, under the influence of a fear that drives men to seek safety in the eternal (and, I might add, in the self-willed) seems to me correct. But to regard this as being also the beginning of all artistic creativity is, I feel, an unjustified and also unnecessary piece of "historicization," quite apart from the fact that it ascribes to the primitive a "prime fear" which I should take to belong rather to our own psychology than to his world-outlook. ...

[93]

... The collective ideology underlying abstract art-forms is undoubtedly based on a sense of fear ; but the first product of this is a belief in the soul —in fact, religion—and not, at that stage, artistic creativity , which appears to arise only out of an individual self-assertion against that fear. It is this individual need for expression that is overlooked by all æsthetic, including Worringer's.

That is,
æsthetic is
a reception-side
rather than
a creation-side
concept.

Yet this [the "individual need for expression"] exists in the individual of every age just as definitely as does the frightened feeling of dependence which leads to collective immortality-ideologies, whereas art, how much it may employ collective style-forms, is derived from the personal urge to immortalization. Only at certain times and in certain situations this feeling of terrified dependence gains the upper hand and urges the creative individual to make use , like the rest, of the collective forms produced by the religious and social ideologies of such periods as a means to express his personal urge to immortalization. On the other hand, periods of superlative self-confidence produce a naturalistic art-form as a manifestation of command over nature.

So, Rank outflanks the reductionists as far as he is able, until here we have hit determinist bedrock; here we join the reductionists, since we can't quite beat them. These are on-the-whole assessments of a decidedly mechanistic bent. If such assessments don't explicitly disallow exceptions to the pattern, they do beg the same question as does reductionism itself: to what use(s) may be put an on-the-whole assessment which permits of no more case-by-case certainty than blind conjecture?

The only uses I can imagine are instrumental uses, and vis-a-vis all things art I tend to think that is a terrible idea, perhaps the worst. And now I am repeating myself, so I had better keep things moving along.

The basic takeaway, again, seems to be that the audience does not see or hear much at all of the personal urge . What do they see-and-hear? The residua of any collective forms which the artist has commandeered as mere means towards their personal ends.

There's a lot more to it than that, I suspect, and I've not yet succeeded (still) in fully grasping everything that Rank presents here. But this is already a lot! If we really want to try to tease out the contours of the initial "urge" from an analysis of its disjunctions with the prevailing "collective forms," or its disjunctions with the artist's prior work, then we have to try to construct some reduction-of-the-whole which can serve as a standard of comparison. No such endeavor will fail to find plenty of deviations from the norm, since those are precisely what have been "reduced" out of the model from the very start. That is precisely what is proved by such exercises: that they are circular. And beyond that? Nothing much! What can really be said about such deviations other than that they are deviations? Most likely we knew that already; what we didn't know was what motivated them, and we still don't know that.

But we also don't know if the pursuit of underlying motivations is necessary at all, or even helpful, even if it were (somehow) possible to see it through. Of course this is where the twin problem of "biography" comes in. We haven't yet returned to this problem, but it is the same problem faced from the opposite direction. Any and all bio-deviations have a psychological salience for voyeuristic onlookers (i.e. all human beings) that may not (probably does not) correspond to any real causal relevance. If it is hard to believe that Stockhausen's early life had no effect at all upon his later work, it is equally hard to buy the absurdly reductionist view of Mauceri, for whom (it would seem) no other considerations are necessary to consider even if they may also be relevant.

(Mauceri of course also does not find biography to be equally salient in all cases; he treats Stockhausen's case rather differently from many other cases he considers. But biography is not something that only some people have, or that some people have more of than others. "Salience" is the variable, not "biography." That is the more damning point. A placid, two-parent unbringing may just as well be proffered as a causal factor, but only certain commentators, e.g. militant Marxists or feminists, are very likely to seize upon this purportedly "normal" backstory and reframe it as a fact to-be-explained instead of a mere fact-to-be-accepted. Anyway, we never get anything quite this explicit from Rank regarding the parochial or mundane art-issues of his own time, but it is all here, implicitly. And, uh . . . the more things change, . . . )

It is at this point that it so often feels necessary (the more so for me with each one of these sprawling annotations of some canonical thinker-on-art) to put all of the art-theory stuff to the side, for a while, or perhaps for good, and to investigate instead everything that goes into the misplaced self-confidence of the "mechanistic" biographer or aesthetic analyst. I used to say things like, "it's hard to believe this woolly thinking would be tolerated in other fields," but now I can see that it is not merely "tolerated," but in fact it is how people think unless-and-until they try very hard not to; all of this, all the same, certainly according to Taleb, in all manner of purportedly rigorous institutions and organizations.

The whole philosophy-of-mind business never much appealed to me before. Mostly that's because I had no meaningful application for it. Secondarily, it's because no one who spouts off about it seemed to have much of an application for it either, aside from all the spouting.

I suppose I do, now, have an application for it. Elsewhere Rank writes, in Psychology and the Soul, that psychology ultimately gets thrown back upon ethics and epistemology. Philosophy-of-mind would belong to the "epistemology" part, I suppose.

Needless to say, though, that my interest is (always has been) really in the ethics part. People can think whatever they want about Stockhausen's experiences with losing his mother; it doesn't much matter what they think about this, unless they start talking about it publicly and non-negligible numbers of other people start listening intently. That side of the problem seems to me both more manageable and more urgent! I would rather that we refrain, collectively, from lecturing people on how or what to think. Better to direct all that thinking-about-thinking towards the question of how to act, and then to make some very careful, incremental tests of the resulting ideals.

And even if both style-forms

That is:

(1) the "frightened" taking-over of "collective" forms for "personal" "immortalization,"

and

(2) the "naturalistic" form arising from "superlative self-confidence,"

are based, as Worringer maintains, on the need for self-renunciation , yet we must not overlook the equally strong tendency to self-affirmation which may express itself, at one time directly as supremacy over nature , and at another indirectly as an ideological freeing from her dependence.

Instead of

... which may express itself ...

we might better say

... which may be interpreted , at one time
directly ..., and at another indirectly ..., but only
in search of explanatory power
and never in search of predictive power. ...

In naturalistic art, which is born, not of fear, but of man's sense of superiority (whether imagined or justified),

Well, honestly I would just love to believe this since it would succinctly and conclusively furnish all the moral justification anyone could ever need for eschewing naturalism . . . but how could one actually believe this?

man rises to an imitative command of his world-around; on the contrary, in abstract art , which is born of a sense of dependence , he appears as self-creative .

That's not so great either! I mean, it sounds great, but it cannot ever be true . . . just like the previous option.

Are these the only two options?

But this creative self-affirmation is as little the specific essence
[94]
of artistic creativity as self-renunciation is that of æsthetic experience. For, as Worringer himself suggests, abstraction and intuition are not specifically characteristic of artistic experience, but are general psychological attitudes towards the world, and they also manifest themselves in correspondingly varied art-forms and artistic expressions.

Indeed, and if so then one would think they manifest themselves in all kinds of human actions. Faced with something as broad as general psychological attitudes towards the world , then surely there is a moral element at play here. But again, explanatory power is not predictive power. Not everyone with the attitude of a murderer or a rescuer will murder or rescue, though their "attitude" may seem to us absolutely unmistakble. "No lawyer would invoke an "N=1" argument in defense of a person, saying "he only killed once."" (Taleb, Antifragile) This is the most urgent and broadly applicable lesson of Rank's assertion of dynamic as against mechanistic accounts of human actions. Morality is the bedrock, not prediction.

As Becker later sees, it is downright wasteful to apply all of this only to art. But it does apply to art! Nota bene!!

What,
then,
is
this art-form-in-itself,

which the will creates,

now by abstraction,
now by naturalistic introjection,

and now again by self-projection into nature?

To answer this question
we must turn again
from the æsthetic criticism of style
to psychology on the one hand
and to
philosophy and the genetics of Culture on the other . ...

...the primitive spends a far greater portion of his total life than we do on a super-real plane, to which he is elevated by his magical conception of the world. We know now that not only his art but his whole attitude towards life is abstract, based as it is on a naïve belief in the soul.

Well, Becker (for one) does not accept the first part of this, that the primitive spends a far greater portion of his total life than we do on a super-real plane .

"there is no need to postulate a mind differently constituted from our own. Man controls nature by whatever he can invent,... ...as the modern mechanic carries around his tools, so did the primitive scrupulously transport his charms and rebuild his altars.
"We call it magic because we don't believe it worked, and we call our technology scientific because we believe it works. I am not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control of nature as is our science, but in our time we are beginning to live with some strange and uncomfortable realizations. Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. ... Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to work, and to work infallibly, since we have to put all our trust in them. And so when they fail to work our whole world view begins to crumble just as the primitives world view did when they found their rituals were not working...
(Escape From Evil, pp. 8-9)

This much has long since become old hat. I include so much of this primitive business here anyway because the next part, the abstract   attitude towards life and the naïve belief in the soul , this seems like an indispensible part of the argument, for better or worse; and, if reports of its demise also have been exaggerated, it seems to me that the gory details are a bit different there.

With the primitive, therefore,
art cannot be detached from his supernatural conception of the world,
for it remains—as, for that matter,
even in highly developed communities—as
an essential and inseparable part of
[95]
the collective life as a whole.
It is only not so for us,
whose whole world-picture is realistic
and becomes from day to day more concrete,
and for whom art
(side by side with the scanty shreds of religious feeling that remain to us)
is only a last remnant of that super-real world
which it formerly objectified and of which it was a part.

All talk of last remnants is a bit dubious. Geneticism is the mechanistic explanation par excellence. Rank's larger thrust here is entirely against that kind of thinking. All of this, too, is unfortunate and a bit confounding.

There are points worth considering here even so.

At minimum, it's safe to say that once something gets started, and once this start is recorded even minimally, some genetic influence is at least likely, if never perfectly assured. "Remnants" are all around us, certainly; it is the assertion that we are slave to them, not the assertion that there are other avenues available, which is the conjecture crying out for support.

Even after we no long have any free will, even after there is a Collective Unconscious or a political, social, and cultural context drawing ever-shrinking boundaries around artistic endeavor, even after all manner of similarly deterministic outlooks have been articulated and enshrined, these explanations remain cyclical, whereas "remnants" imply linear development. If primitives a world apart in time and space can create nearly identical artworks independent of each other, then the later is not a "remnant" of the earlier. The Jungian strain of determinism would defeat not just the causa-sui conceit but also all the other determinisms. They would fight amongst themselves.

Rank says that now our whole world-picture is realistic and becomes from day to day more concrete . He has laid out certain affinities between the realistic and the concrete without quite rendering them (or any such variables) as "mechanistically" linked. Where can they be unlinked? Most facilely, there is the question of how much "realism" is good for us and whether a little bit of "abstract" (here meaning something like "immaterial") pretense might be good for the soul and good for the mind too, good even for a contemporary, hyper-rational mind.

Becker notes, above and elsewhere, that contemporary technological "magic" is much more "destructive" than its "primitive" predecessors. That seems to me like the crucial point!

In this magical world-picture [of the "primitive"],...
the need for self-renunciation , as we understand it, had no place;
for it only appears when there is a dualism of two worlds to promote a desire to flee from one into the other .
...we have already contrasted [this "need"] with the religious and the erotic renunciations of the self
which are achieved respectively through collective and through individualistic ideologies.
The æsthetic self-renunciation , similarly, is founded on what we may call a "social" ideology ,
since the work of art,
for all its personal dynamic expression,
always strives to make an effect on others,...

AHA!!

Some effect, perhaps. But just how social is this peculiar kind of striving, really, when it amounts to "starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other"?

One need not have an effect in mind before the fact, and indeed there is nothing about personal dynamic expression per se which requires this.

The more important point, in any case, is that the artist is not likely to be able to predict the effects of their work, the same with Poe as with Prokofiev or Pastorius. One had better try to anticipate it, on some basic level, else one were to litter the social scene with unpleasant or dangerous booby traps; but one cannot expect to get very far beyond this most basic level of prediction. If there is to be any art at all, there will be plenty of failure of prediction about its effects.

At that point, veritably striving to make an effect is at best superfluous; one need not try very hard. But to make a "just that effect and no other?" Be careful what you wish for.

...the central question of all æsthetic is:
how does the artist achieve this effect,
that enables so many others to identify themselves with the work?
The older æsthetic answered this by referring it to nature-imitation.
The creative artist, one was told,
identified himself so extensively with nature that he was able to imitate it,
and this human imitation of nature, again,
made it possible for the non-productive person to identify himself
at least with this imitated nature.
But the explanation is so unsatisfactory and presumes so many psychological improbabilities
that it could not survive the critical analysis of modern æsthetics,
and already it is considered as definitely refuted.

Ostensibly this is because imitation of nature turned out not to be quite as broad a basis for identification as once hoped. But it could also be because "identification" isn't quite the right concept here. The idea that "imitation" rested upon "identification" is new to me, certainly, modern that I am. It seems implausible, or at least imprecise. But the notion that this affords non-productive people a role (of sorts) vis-a-vis art is worth considering in some depth, if only because the identification-with-the-imitated-rather-than-the-imitator has had quite an improbably long run in the intervening century, long after Rank here pronounced it dead.

Once it had been established, however,
that art had nothing to do with imitating nature,
a new theory of its aims became necessary.
For to the nature-imitation theorists
art must have seemed an aimless pastime,
an ideal vision—as the Classicist æsthetic tried to define it—
soaring above all utilitarian criteria.

Indeed. But as we have since learned, there's no escaping all utilitarian criteria .

The ostensible absence of usefulness, total and seemingly certain, even this un-usefulness proves in the end to have uses. That's because, as always, as with what Rank has said about æsthetic, creation and reception play by different rules. There's no debating the usefulness-of-uselessness as a generative heuristic. This is just one more instance of competing effect theorists talking past each other. How many hapless inventors-and-inventions need fall by the wayside, how many Baby Mozart records need be sold, before we finally give up the effects racket?

This is to say, also, that an artist's conscious disregard of utilitarian concerns throughout the generative process cannot be taken to indicate, one-to-one, a total ignorance of or resistance to the future utilitarian reclaiming of the given work. It may in fact reflect the belief (which of course we do well to interrogate with the same due rigor as any other such pretension) that a narrow utilitarian objective during creation in fact constrains future use by channeling it into a similarly narrow channel. (To so much as be able to think so, one probably cannot be much of a "social" ideologist to start with.)

Today we know, for instance, that
the aims of primitive art
[96]
were, though definite, not directly practical ;
they began by being ideal aims and only thereafter,
through religous ritual and wonder-working magic,
decisively influenced man and his destiny.

I for one would rather not speculate on such things, but this certainly is one direction to take the above points!

The first formula that we found for primitive art
followed from our view of it as a concrete presentation
of the abstraction underlying the magical world-outlook,
of which the essence is the soul-concept.
Here art still coincides almost completely with religion,
but this means, not that it is identical with the transcendent,
but that—now as later—it is the objectification thereof.
If belief in the soul may be taken as religion,
or at any rate as the preliminary stage of it,
we must admit that art was at first, and for a long time to come,
the handmaid of religion.
Its "aim" was to prove the existence of the soul by concretizing it,
and it achieved this by presenting the abstract in abstract form—
that is, by imitating as faithfully as possible ,
not reality ,
but unreality .
Thus we can detect both the imitative instinct of artistic creativity and the practical aimlessness of art even in these primitive stages. The imitation , however, concerns the unreal , which later becomes steadily more naturalized and humanized, while the aimlessness concerns reality —a fact which æsthetics has, strangely enough,
inverted
by looking for imitativeness, vis-à-vis reality,
in which domain it has no purpose—
and so being led to deny that art has any aim
except that of æsthetic gratification.

WHEW!!

So,
imitativeness
in fact
has no purpose
regarding
reality !

"Reality" cannot actually be "imitated" very well at all. That is the old formalistic Platonism. Rank has something else in mind, though: he means that there is no psychological "purpose" to the mere "imitation of reality." Even the "primitive," who appears to us now to have lived in barely any "reality" at all, even (s)he in fact must have had some working construction of "reality," and therefore (s)he had no need to attempt to prove the existence of any given part of it. What did (does!) require some extra proof beyond what is obvious and forthcoming in the normal run of things? Precisely that which is unreal .

So, umm . . . anyone seen any good movies lately?