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

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

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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?