Whispers of the gods #9

Last time in our discussion of George Steiner’s Real presences¹ we got up to his two historic examples of endless interpretation of holy texts (rabbinic exegesis in Judaism and mediaeval scholasticism) and his one secular historic example of endless proliferation of associated connotations (Freudian psychoanalysis).

Ninth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence² and Real presences

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3; #4; #5; #6; #7; and #8.

Sigmund Freud

What do these three have in common? All three are series of sentences, phrases, language fragments, texts, which are related in specific ways, and where the driving force is a search for an ‘answer’. In the case of rabbinic exegesis and mediaeval Christian scholasticism it is the answer to what the holy texts ‘mean’ – in the sense of ‘what are they about?’ as well as ‘what do they mean for us?’

In the case of psychoanalysis the answer is therapeutic: Why are you disturbed? Why are you suffering? Why do you behave the way you do? (Eg compulsively, neurotically, obsessively.) What does your behaviour mean?

In all three cases there is no ultimately satisfactory criterion for when the ‘answer’ has been reached, or whether the answer really is an answer. In all three cases the ‘answer’ arguably comes from outside.

In rabbinic exegesis the rule of thumb is that the holy text must mean something ethically good – if an interpretation suggests something ethically negative, the exegete must keep on searching for possible meanings until an ethically positive one results. Who is the judge of what is ethically positive? Surely the exegete himself, or his colleagues?

In mediaeval scholasticism the arbiter is whoever has the political power to arbitrate. So the answer comes from the power structure, not the text.

In psychoanalysis the answer comes from the therapist or patient. The therapist’s alarm clock goes off because the next appointment is due. Or he or she decides the patient is sufficiently cured. Or the patient does. By extension, says Steiner, any Freudian interpretation of works of art or literature is similarly endless, and any termination similarly arbitrary.

Steiner gives us a taste of another endlessness – his apparently endless disgust with the age he lives in and the culture he observes around him:

The imbalance between the secondary and its object, between the ‘text’… and the explicative-evaluative commentary [it] occasion[s], is very nearly grotesque. Parasitic discourse feeds upon living utterance; as in microbiological food-chains the parasitic in turn feeds upon itself. Criticism, meta-criticism, dia-criticism, the criticism of criticism, pullulate.

The non-parasitic (lions) feeding on itself (buffalo)

The parasitic feeds on itself? Yes some parasites feed on other parasites, but they do not generally feed on themselves, even in the murky world of the microbiological. Some non-parasitic heterotrophs (eg lions) feed on other non-parasitic heterotrophs (eg buffalo). So what? Not sure the image has the edge he thinks it has. Maybe it was an attempt to distract attention from the fact that what he is doing is criticism of criticism of criticism.

The mushrooming of semantic-critical jargon, the disputations between structuralists, post-structuralists, meta-structuralists and deconstructionists, the attention accorded both in the academy and the media to theoreticians and publicists of the aesthetic – all these carry within their bustling pretence the germs of more or less rapid decay. …It can be argued that the sepulchre, heaped around the primary text by exegesis and criticism, is made of ephemeral plaster. The inflation of the parasitic is halted when the constructs of spuriousness collapse under their own weight, when the zero-point of trust and felt meaning is reached…

We flinch from the immediate pressures of mystery in poetic, in aesthetic acts of creation as we do from the realisation of our diminished humanity, of all that is literally bestial in the murderousness and gadgetry of this age…

This is real ‘Golden Age’ stuff, and there are pages of it. When was civilisation so much more wonderful than now? And I don’t mean just the bits in stately homes and art galleries.

His answer is that we must

redefine… the life of meaning in the text, in music, in art. We must come to recognise… a meaningfulness which is that of a freedom of giving and of reception beyond the constraints of immanence…

…The pertinent categories of inference and felt intelligibility are theological and metaphysical. [My emphasis.]

Ahah. Quite a claim.

References

¹ George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

² George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #8

It’s like dreaming you’re walking in the half-light next to a high but apparently loosely textured hedge. The hedge looks as if you could get right inside it – not so dense you’d only press in an inch or two. Surely you could walk right through it without much difficulty? Perhaps in your dream you think there’s something or somewhere on the other side of the hedge which you are trying to get to. So you take a short cut.

Eighth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence¹ and Real presences²

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3; #4; #5; #6; and #7.

Alas, the half-light has halved to quarter-light, and now you are inside it the hedge is a lot thicker than it seemed in the half-light. Partly because of your surprise you begin to lose direction: you try to come out the way you came but the way isn’t there any more. The quarter-light has halved again to almost darkness and the hedge is far more tangled and dense than you ever imagined, and you wonder what on earth made you think it would be a short cut. And then you can’t remember where it was supposed to be a short cut to…

This is what reading George Steiner’s Real Presences is like.

William Wordsworth

We inhabit a world, says Steiner, where the secondary is primary to the primary, and the primary is secondary to the secondary. It’s actually even worse than that:

We have texts about the possibility and epistemological status of preceding secondary texts. There was, for example, Wordsworth. Thereafter came the flood of comment on Wordsworth. Today, the ardour burns in the paper on the semantic possibilities or impossibilities of writing about Wordsworth…

He asks:

How can personal sensibility go upstream, to the living springs of ‘first being’? Does such an image of the primal have any legitimacy?

Well, to an extent I think he’s invented a problem which he now wants to find a clever solution to. There is a world outside academia, and that outside world isn’t just music and book reviews in half-baked tabloids.

To give a cheesy example – but not so cheesy that its cheesiness invalidates it – a parent’s first sight of their first or latest baby must at least sometimes count as an encounter with ‘first being’? The world could have 100 times the academic meta-meta-texts on Romantic poets, and people would still hate their bosses or fall in love.

Or perhaps I misunderstand the point. Perhaps the point is not to do with authentic reality per se, but to do with navigating like a super-learned Speke against the current of (meta-)ⁿtext to whatever there might be at its source.

So we shall sail, wade or trudge on, to see what further enlightenment his quest may bring us.

His question (Does such an image of the primal have any legitimacy?) arises, he says,

fundamentally, at three moments in the Western tradition.

The three are rabbinic exegesis in Judaism; mediaeval Christian scholasticism; and psychoanalysis. He then gives a characteristically laboured account of each of these.

I need to take a breath. So I think his point is to present three historic examples not just of digging through ‘material’ to get to ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, but of digging through layers of text to get to original meaning. The meaning may not necessarily be intended meaning – as the example of psychoanalysis illustrates. But the digging seems to be from secondary (tertiary, quaternary etc) layers of text (meaning) through (down?) to (or towards?) the primal text (meaning). Maybe ‘text’ is a bit misleading in the primal context, as it may not pre-exist: it may be the task of the ‘digger’ to reveal it – and therefore effectively to construct it?

Another question is whether ‘primal’ here means ‘original’ as in first in sequence (as in cause followed by effect?); or ‘logically prior’ (in the sense of something from which the secondary can be deduced); or something else? I am still not 100% clear. I wonder if George is 100% clear what he means by all these words he has stitched together?

Enough preamble. Let’s do Judaism, where

unending commentary and commentary upon commentary are elemental. Talmudic exegesis exfoliates into uninterrupted study of and commentary on the Talmud. The lamps of explication must burn unquenched before the tabernacle. Hermeneutic unendingness and survival in exile are, I believe, kindred.

Siege and destruction of Jerusalem

Again that feeling of suffocation. So Judaism will live forever because it is always possible to reinterpret the reinterpretation of the n^th reinterpretation of holy text? (Of course it isn’t just Steiner who says this.) The text and meta-text and endless exegetic study replace the Temple the Romans destroyed in 70 CE.

There are two key terms in ‘survival in exile’. Firstly:

all commentary is itself an act of exile. All exegesis and gloss transports [sic] the text into some measure of distance and banishment.

But it is also an act of survival:

the commentary underwrites… the continued authority and survival of the primary discourse. It liberates the life of meaning from that of historical-geographical contingency…

This reading without end represents the foremost guarantee of Jewish identity. …It has proved to be the instrument of improbable survival.

Whenever I read about this (not just in Real Presences) I ask myself why, why? I think of cultures which did not morph into museums of themselves, but passed away instead: Vikings, Etruscans, Carthaginians; or blended and then passed away as independent currents: Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Romans, Ancient Greeks.

The rabbinic answer to the dilemma of the unending commentary is one of moral action and enlightened conduct. The hermeneutic exposition is not an end in itself. It aims to translate into normative instruction meanings indwelling in the manifold previsions of the sacred message. …Via ever-renewed interpretations, this very same biblical verse, this very same parable, shall, in times and places of need as yet unknown, deploy illuminations and practical, existential applications as yet unperceived.

Again: why, why? If the point is to come up with ethical guidance why must it be twisted and wrung out of old words? Was there – or is there still – an even higher purpose to prove the illuminations come from those old words and nowhere else?

Mediaeval scholastic scene

Then it’s mediaeval Christian scholasticism and we get even more tangled up:

Self-replicating and variant, the helix of scholastic commentary winds around the stem of the scriptural and patristic canon. …The fine-nerved severities of formal analysis, the branching nuances of grammatical-semantic probing in the arts of reading of medieval schoolmen, no longer are a part of general or, indeed, privileged literacy. If they were, much on recent semiotics and grammatology would seem derivative from that earlier phenomenology and methodology of extreme scruple…

This appetite, together with the postulate of a fourfold and ascending scale of understanding, from the literal and the moralizing, to the allegorical and the anagogical or purely spiritual… begets unending commentary. Scholastic and clerical authorities were acutely aware of the dilemma.

Indeed: same dilemma as the ones the rabbis identified. But mediaeval Christianity had a characteristically political solution:

The primary had to be protected from the choking growth of the secondary. Papal and councillary efforts were made to determine the true and everlasting meanings of the revealed…

…[E]xplicative and legislative decrees promulgated by Rome and by the custodians of orthodoxy in medieval Paris… proclaim that the primary text can mean this and this, but not that.

The third ‘trial of methodological and applied insight into the relations between primary and secondary orders of enunciation’ is psychoanalysis. This is another

infinite series. Each unit in the associative chain does not only connect horizontally and in linear sequence with the next; it can itself become the starting point for an unbounded set of new linked connotations, associations and recall.

In this ‘resolutely secular’ context the sequence ends not with perceived ethical enlightenment or by doctrinal decree, but when the hour’s consultation is up or with some equally ‘arbitrary’ closure.

Ludwig Wittgenstein 1947

Steiner mentions Wittgenstein’s discomfort with this familiar dilemma of ‘semantic unendingness’ in psychoanalysis:

[Freud] wants to say that whatever happens in a dream will be found to be connected with some wish which analysis can bring to light. But this procedure of free association and so on is queer, because Freud never shows how we know where to stop—where is the right solution. Sometimes he says that the right solution, or the right analysis, is the one that satisfies the patient. Sometimes he says that the doctor knows what the right solution or analysis of the dream is whereas the patient doesn’t: the doctor can say that the patient is wrong.

The reason why he calls one sort of analysis the right one, does not seem to be a matter of evidence. Neither is the proposition that hallucinations, and so dreams, are wish fulfilments…³

Back to Steiner (alas). As with therapy, so with Freudian commentary on art and literature:

Knowing no dogmatic terminality, psychoanalytic commentary on literature and the arts, its reinterpretation of precedent psychoanalytic readings – witness the tertiary literature on Freud’s explications of Shakespeare, of Michelangelo, of Leonardo, of Dostoevsky or of Poe – are without end.

Steiner sees this interminability in

psychoanalytic pursuits of meaning… [as] …illustrative of all interpretive and critical treatment of the aesthetic. … [T]he very methodologies and techniques which would restore to us the presence of the source, of the primary, surround, suffocate that presence with their own autonomous mass. The tree dies under the hungry weight of the vines.

Which is kind of where we came in. But more to come.

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief, Edited by Cyril Barrett, Blackwell, Oxford, 1978.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Faith and democracy

This is in response to an article by Dr Jonathan Chaplin in the Guardian ‘Face to faith’ feature Saturday 5 December 2009. Dr Chaplin is the director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Cambridge.

According to Chaplin,

Democratic debate should take in as many faith-based and moral views as possible.

This doesn’t seem too controversial. In a democracy it doesn’t particularly matter where the views come from. What matters more is how sound they are, in comparison to other conflicting views.

But that apparently innocuous expression ‘faith-based’ could mean at least two different things. It could mean that the view derives from faith – eg the sort of view a Christian might have or a Muslim might have, because of their respective faith. Or it could mean the view itself depends for its content and/or its supporting arguments on the particular faith it comes from. Which is a very different matter.

Dr Chaplin begins with the claim:

Many secular humanists argue as if faith-based ideas should play no role in democratic discourse, religion should be privatised and the public square secularised. They make three main points. None of them stand up.

Professor AC Grayling

(The link is to an earlier ‘Face to faith’ article by AC Grayling.)

The first of the three ‘misconceived’ secularist points is the fear that

faith-based discourse will cause religious views to be legally imposed on secular citizens.

Such a fear may or may not be well-founded. The example Chaplin gives to counter it is of a debate between one ‘secular’ position and another:

If some future government builds a third runway at Heathrow I will experience having been imposed on by a secularist moral viewpoint I profoundly reject – an irrational faith in endless economic growth held in defiance of scientific findings about climate change. That wouldn’t make me want to exclude that secularist viewpoint from political debate, only argue more strongly against it.

This reassurance unfortunately only works in the context of the innocuous reading of ‘faith-based’. It is hoped that in a debate like this there will eventually come a point where the arguments on both sides will be presented either in terms of apples or of pears, but not apples on one side and pears on the other. So for example the question about the third runway at Heathrow should be decided on whether it is in the best interests of (say) the UK, or of Europe, or the world, or future generations in the UK, Europe or the world. This would clearly presuppose another debate as to whose interests are paramount, but that debate would have to happen if we are to know if we’re talking about apples or pears.

If the apples or pears debate is suppressed, then that could mean the view of one side is imposed on the other, because the conditions for a fair debate do not obtain.

So in the case of a ‘faith-based’ view versus a ‘secular’ view, in the innocuous sense of ‘faith-based’ this would just mean the view just happened to come from a context of faith. Its rationale would not be intrinsically faith-based, so there would be nothing to stop the ‘faith-based’ view and the ‘secular’ view being translated into either apple terms or pear terms, so their merits could be fairly assessed and judged.

But on the other interpretation of ‘faith-based’ this translation is by definition ruled out. If the rationale for the ‘faith-based’ view cannot be translated into the same terms as its ‘secular’ opponent then there is no context for fair debate. If the ‘faith-based’ view then won the day its opponents could rightly claim the decision was imposed.

In theory the same could apply the other way round. If the ‘secular’ view prevailed because the ‘faith-based’ view could not be translated into the terms appropriate for a fair debate, then in theory the proponents of the ‘faith-based’ view could claim the ‘secular’ view has been imposed. But only in theory – or rather in a theocracy. The argument does not hold water in a secular democracy, which is what the UK is.

The second secularist objection is that

faith-based arguments are unintelligible or inaccessible to most citizens, whereas secularist moral arguments can be embraced by everyone.

Chaplin counters this with:

But given that polls suggest over 70% of British people hold to some kind of religious faith, it seems quite likely that most will be able to make some sense of political arguments appealing to faith.

I cannot decide if this argument is disingenuous or just complacent. I am prepared to accept that a poll has happened which has returned a result like this. But in a 1991 UK poll (see Touched by an angel #8), only 24% agreed to the statement ‘I know God exists and I have no doubts about it’. There are also many religious faiths. Can we assume every Christian will understand every political argument appealing to Islamic principles, and vice versa? And so on for every religion and every variant of every religion. It is a bold enough claim to assume that the 70% who said they had ‘some kind of religious faith’ would also agree that the idea of a political argument appealing to faith made sense. It’s even bolder to claim that all 70% would understand every argument of that type.

Desmond Tutu

We then get – and remember this is from the director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Cambridge:

When Desmond Tutu called for the abolition of apartheid legislation because every human being is “made in the image of God”, I don’t recall secularists scratching their head in puzzlement.

This is such a cheap point. The idea of humans being literally made in the image of God is actually very obscure and baffling for a non-believer. (See for example Human Dignity Derived from Christian Teaching.) In a different context ‘secularists’ very probably would scratch their heads. But metaphorically the statement is fairly anodyne. In the context of the struggle against apartheid and of Desmond Tutu’s own unique contribution to that struggle, why would anyone care whether he meant what he said literally or metaphorically? Why would anyone waste time thinking about it, considering that imago dei was only one of countless reasons why apartheid had to go?

Chaplin’s point would only start gaining value if the sole rationale behind the struggle against apartheid had been that all humans were literally made by God in the image of God. That was not the case. And it would have to have been literally because you cannot derive legislation or political policy from a metaphor.

Now we get to Chaplin’s third secularist objection – ‘the weakest’ – which is

that religious faith is just irrational and so can never be the basis of democratic reasoning. The objection comes in cruder positivist forms, such as “belief in God is like belief in invisible unicorns”: if you can’t experience it through the evidence of the five senses, it doesn’t exist.

This is a ‘19th-century view’, according to Chaplin, which

was discredited ages ago by philosophers of science who recognised that human experience is a rich and complex phenomenon yielding reliable knowledge through many routes. There are more sophisticated versions, but all of them fail to see that faith is not an alternative to reasoning but its precondition. All chains of reasoning get going on the basis of presuppositions which cannot themselves be proved rationally.

I’m afraid ‘discredited ages ago by philosophers of science’ is just not good enough. (Is this yet another convenient misreading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?) We are not told who the ‘philosophers of science’ are, so it’s hard to nail this jelly to the wall.

‘[H]uman experience is a rich and complex phenomenon yielding reliable knowledge through many routes’: OK, but so what? Ergo God exists? But invisible unicorns don’t? I don’t remember coming across a philosophy of science that would support an inference like this.

Rhesus monkey

We must be very careful with a statement like ‘faith is not an alternative to reasoning but its precondition’. It is simply not true that ‘[a]ll chains of reasoning get going on the basis of presuppositions which cannot themselves be proved rationally’. For example:

Rhesus monkeys are placental mammals.

All known placental mammals give birth to live young.

Therefore Rhesus monkeys give birth to live young.

Chaplin might have meant to say something rather different, eg that a fundamental scientific theory, like that of relativity, may start out without empirical proof, but as a mathematical model to explain certain anomalies observed against an earlier model – in this case that of Newtonian mechanics. Einstein for example could be said to have had ‘faith’ that relativity was correct, before specific evidence was discovered which confirmed its predictions. Perhaps even more pertinently, Einstein had ‘faith’ that behind the weird world of quantum mechanics was a hidden reality of objects and forces which behaved according to more traditional concepts of cause and effect. In 1982 a series of experiments performed by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris appeared to prove Einstein wrong.

In cases like this ‘faith before knowledge’ is a historical accident – the evidence (for or against) just happens to come after the prediction. As it often does with science. The key points are (a) that the evidence may well emerge eventually; and (even more importantly) we know what would count as evidence. A scientific theory may never be fully ‘proven’, but we can certainly tell what would falsify it.

The claims of religious faith are utterly different. We cannot specify what would falsify a claim that, for example, God exists.

It may well be that ‘human experience is a rich and complex phenomenon yielding reliable knowledge through many routes’, but this gets us nowhere without criteria for sifting out that ‘reliable knowledge’. We have criteria in the sciences and in historical research. What are our criteria for ‘reliable knowledge’ in the context of religion?

Chaplin’s last substantive point is that the third objection

also fails to see that secular humanism is itself a faith standpoint, resting on similarly unprovable assumptions such as the primacy of rational autonomy, the supremacy of natural scientific knowledge, or the self-creation of the cosmos.

Edith Piaf

Well, in terms of the context, which is democratic legislation and policy-making, beliefs about the ‘self-creation of the cosmos’ are neither here nor there. One secular humanist could believe the cosmos created itself from nothing. Another might believe the cosmos, like Edith Piaf’s love, has no beginning and has no end. Another might be completely defeated by cosmology. It is difficult to know how any of these positions could influence legal, political or social policy.

A secular humanist’s beliefs about the ‘supremacy of natural scientific knowledge’ are I think justified by the arguments just given. I agree this belief cannot be proven, as that would involve a vicious circle: what evidence could prove that proof by evidence is sound? But again we must come back to the democratic context. Rejecting the primacy of evidence is something we tend to associate with totalitarianism rather than democracy: Hitler’s ravings about the Reich’s ultimate victory as the Red Army destroyed Berlin; Lysenko’s fraudulent ‘alternative’ to Mendelian genetics; etc etc.

Which leaves us with ‘the primacy of rational autonomy’. I would probably agree that this is ‘unprovable’. I say this not because it is an alleged fact that happens to be unprovable, but because it is a choice which human beings can make, insofar as they are self-conscious and have free will. It is ultimately one’s practical, deliberate, willed assumption that one is responsible for one’s own decisions and one’s own behaviour.

What are the alternatives? That one hands over one’s autonomy to another person or group of people? Hardly consistent with the concept of an adult citizen of a democratic community. Or one hands over one’s autonomy to God – one declares that one’s own rational autonomy is secondary to God? But in the act of submission one is assuming autonomy – otherwise it is not a free choice. So submitting to a faith-based doctrine itself presupposes the ‘unprovable’ assumption of the ‘primacy of rational autonomy’.

In a democracy people are free, within limits, to submit themselves to any faith-based doctrine they choose, or to no faith-based doctrine at all. But that act of submission is a personal thing. It has no implications for other citizens of the democracy. It is not obvious why citizens in a democracy should be under any obligation to see a particular legal, social or political proposal in terms of any faith-based doctrine any other citizen should have chosen to submit himself or herself to.

In view of the personal, individual nature of that submission, the onus is rather on the believer not to impose the implications of his or her personal, individual choice on others who have not made that same choice.

If the nature of the submission is such that the individual can no longer see himself or herself under that obligation, then it does not seem unreasonable for the democracy to take steps to compensate for this by reducing the potential influence of faith-based views on legal, social or political policy-making.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #7

I have finally finished reading George Steiner’s Real presences¹ for the second time and I feel I have got my life back.  

Seventh in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence² and Real presences  

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3; #4; #5; and #6.  

I read Real presences the second time because I didn’t think I understood enough of it properly enough the first time.  

Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion

I read it the first time because of a challenge John Cornwell makes in his book Darwin’s angel³, to a remark Richard Dawkins had made in The God delusion.⁴ (See Touched by an angel #7 for more context.)  

Dawkins had said:  

If there is a logical argument linking the existence of great art to the existence of God, it is not spelled out by its proponents⁵

Cornwell replied:  

You don’t seem to have looked very far. You might not agree with it, but here is one example among many of just such an argument – spelled out at length by George Steiner in… Real Presences.⁶

Real presences has made me consider my own mortality. I must be more careful in future not to waste too much of what little time I have left digging for meaning in prose which does not want to give it up.  

It is one of the most unpleasant books I have read for a long time, and I am quite angry with John Cornwell for sending me on what turned out to be a wild goose chase. I am not sure Real presences counts as an ‘argument’. Nor would I say it was ‘spelled out’, as that could imply analytical clarity. But ‘at length’ I would agree with.  

So far, from Whispers of the gods #3 to Whispers of the gods #6, I have covered much of the first section (A SECONDARY CITY) where Steiner describes a fictional ‘society of the primary’, where artists, writers and musicians practise their trades but critics do not – in either the academic world or the demi-monde of journalism.  

The parable labours its point, which is that in the ‘consumer societies of the West today’ the reality is the opposite – we are drowning under an avalanche of critical comment on art, literature and music, out of all proportion to the objects the avalanche is about.  

As far as journalism is concerned he scoffs:  

The mass media employ marriage counsellors and astrologers. Why should they not employ art critics and music reviewers?  

That quote was uncharacteristically lucid. Steiner is more at home with polysyllabic disparagement:  

Manifold accommodations between aesthetic consumption and political-social power, between leisure and industrialization, are relevant. The assumption of parliamentary and bureaucratic control by the educated bourgeoisie in the 1830s and 1840s dissociates the greater part of literary, artistic and musical patronage from the aristocratic and ecclesiastical élite of an ancien regime. Art, letters, music must now compete for response in the emporia of middle-class taste….  

The consequence is a peculiar dialectic of false immediacy. Every day, in the urban centres, the new consumer – the middle-class reader, spectator, concert-goer, visitor of art galleries – is directed towards possible objects of perception and valuation. At the same time he is ‘distanced’ from the goods displayed. His personal involvement in the text or painting or symphony, his potential investment in risks of consciousness, are mundanely gauged…  

Francis Bacon: Head VI (1949)

Don’t you yearn for that Golden Age of authenticity before the French Revolution ruined it for everyone? It gets more insidious:  

For Plato, a true adult is one whose discourse bears on the laws and politics of his city… But… [w]ith the exponential anonymity and technicality of public functions, personal commitment to the political has become a more or less stale manoeuvre of delegation. Talk about culture, cultured talk, talk about such talk – ‘have you read this morning’s book review?’, ‘have you seen what the pundits say of the world genius of Bacon and the decline of Henry Moore?’ – fills a certain political vacuum…  

Because ‘people’ (ie eligible citizens, but not slaves) lack the direct political access a Greek city-state would have given them, they are happy to make do with journalistic criticism? Are these the only two possibilities? Maybe they read novels, watch films, read newspapers, watch television, drink beer, fall in love, tell jokes, go to work, play sport, look after their children… etc etc etc?  

I’m being unfair. But there is so much elitist assertion in this book and so little actual cogent argument. And I must find ways to condense my anger.  

Anyway, that’s journalism. Next the academic turns on academia.  

The thing is I’d probably agree with much of what he says if his language wasn’t so pompous and Blümpisch.  

He complains that most of the clever stuff in modern lit-crit was already being done hundreds if not thousands of years ago:  

[T]here is scarcely one among our interpretive-critical methods – the gloss, the footnote, the emendation, the recension of various readings, the critical paraphrase – which was not practised by the ancient Academy and Alexandria. Cicero’s heuristic, mimetic and critical treatments of the Greek legacy constitute the binding model for the scholastic-academic enterprise of the humanities in the West…  

Marcus Tullius Cicero

When lit-crit knew its place, that place was old books. Which was before  

…its territorial extension from the canonic to the contemporary.  

With rare exceptions, textual commentary of an academic cast is, during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and most of the nineteenth century, brought to bear on the presiding genius of the Greco-Roman source.  

The ‘vital distinction’ between the ‘canonic’ (worthy of academic attention) and the ‘contemporary’ (unworthy) has suffered ‘erosion’. And it is all the fault of the Americans. The turn of the 20th century saw American universities importing pedagogic programmes and traditions from their German counterparts but – horror of horrors – applying them to contemporary art and literature:  

Democracy is, fundamentally, at odds with the canonic…  

…The American genius would democratize eternity…  

…Poets, novelists, choreographers, painters of the most derivative or passing interest, are made the object of seminars and dissertations, of undergraduate lectures and post-doctoral research.  

One would like to ask: of passing interest to whom? But the floodgates have opened and we are all drowning:  

The entire notion of research in modern letters is vitiated by the evidently false postulate that tens of thousands of young men and women will have anything new and just to say about Shakespeare or Keats or Flaubert.  

He probably has a point, but it’s a bit rich coming from a Fellow of the British Academy, winner of the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. Perhaps he was never young. Or he always stood head and shoulders above those other tens of thousands.  

Truman Capote

Less clear is the inference he draws from this. If he was just berating the opportunism, the careerism, the vicious circularity of modern professional life in the humanities, it would be understandable. But he has a more enticing quarry in his sights:  

The Byzantine dominion of secondary and parasitic discourse over immediacy, of the critical over the creative, is itself a symptom. An anxious desire for interposition, for explicative-evaluative mediation between ourselves and the primary, permeates our condition…  

…I shall be arguing that we crave remission from direct encounter with the ‘real presence’ or the ‘real absence of that presence’, the two phenomenologies being rigorously inseparable, which an answerable experience of the aesthetic must enforce on us. We seek the immunities of indirection. In the agency of the critic, reviewer or mandarin commentator, we welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation.  

These are two very different claims. The first is that there is an army of academics lucky enough to be carving careers of doubtful value, in a self-referential South Sea Bubble of secondary, tertiary, quaternary etc discourse, busy dissecting and interpreting non-canonic artefacts that weren’t worth much in the first place. A bit harsh, but George knows this world better than I do. A world with an apparent surfeit of emperors and deficit of new clothes.  

The second claim is that it’s a world ‘we’ want, not just because it keeps ‘us’ in food, sex and fame, but because ‘we’ want to be insulated from the real primary presence of art and literature. The implication is that there was an earlier time when there was more direct and authentic aesthetic appreciation going on, but now ‘we’ have wilfully interposed an ‘explicative-evaluative’ barrier between ourselves and this ‘immediacy’.  

This second claim does not follow from the first. In all the slabs, joists, beams and architraves of Steinerspeak so far I cannot find any clear foundation for it. Yet I think this is the one that matters for his case. Perhaps he assumes it’s true because he has said it?

More next time…

References

¹ George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.  

² George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.  

³ John Cornwell, Darwin’s angel: an angelic riposte to The God Delusion, Profile Books, London, 2007.  

⁴ Richard Dawkins, The God delusion, Bantam, 2006.  

⁵ Richard Dawkins, 2006: see ⁴ above.  

⁶ John Cornwell, 2007: see ³ above.  

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

A secular imperative to love

This post responds to yet another interesting dialogue with Terry Sissons, the author of The Other I.

Karen Armstrong: The case for God

It followed from the last of a series I had written about Karen Armstrong’s new book The case for God: What religion really means.

In a previous conversation, either on Terry’s blog or my own, I’d written – probably in the context of rejecting transcendent spirituality as a foundation for ethics – ‘Love is hard enough. But it is also enough.’ (For clarity, read the second sentence as ‘But love is also enough – of an imperative’.) Then later, as part of the Case for God exchange, Terry asked me why I thought that. Below is an attempt to expand on my original response.

The first step is to state my belief that humans have probably evolved to be the entities they are: sentient, social, interdependent, mortal etc. I say this not because I particularly want an evolutionary explanation to be true, but because an evolutionary explanation seems more sound, and to require less metaphysical baggage and/or wishful thinking than any other explanation currently on offer.

The next step is to say that, because humans are (have evolved to be) the sort of entities they are, they feel emotion, they can use reason, and they can make choices.

In this context I don’t think I am presupposing any specific philosophical or scientific perspective on free will, just making the observation that humans do make choices – whatever ‘making a choice’ actually boils down to. As it happens, I have no problem accepting as an assumption that humans evolved, by natural selection, to be the sort of organisms who have free will and are able to make conscious choices. The reason I am happy to assume this is that convincing and coherent evolutionary explanations are available for such a broad range of other features of living organisms, and no other (eg theistic) explanation for ‘free will’ is any more acceptable even on its own terms, let alone being able to fit into a more general explanation of human existence.

At risk of over-egging the pudding, I will try to spell out exactly what I am trying to say here. I think the combined evidence for evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life is overwhelmingly convincing. This does not mean it is unassailable truth. No science is unassailable truth – it wouldn’t be science if it was. But no other explanation comes near it in explanatory power. It therefore sets the benchmark.

Raphael: Adam and Eve

‘Setting the benchmark’ means that another kind of explanation – eg for a specific feature of a specific living organism – will need to be consistent with the overall evolutionary explanation if it is to be taken seriously. Take for example the hypothesis that free will has somehow been given us by God. This hypothesis would need to include an explanation of how this gift would have been possible in the context of an overall developmental path driven by natural selection. I have not yet come across any explanation which is remotely convincing.

I have also not come across any remotely convincing argument to the effect that what we know as ‘free will’ could not have evolved.

It is for these two reasons that I feel no discomfort in accepting that ‘free will’ probably evolved without having much idea how it evolved.

We can now return to the main thread.

Some of the choices open to evolved human beings fit inside other choices. Because I have chosen x, then further choices can or need to be made, choices which only appear as choices because of x. (We do not always choose consciously – we are not purely algorithmic all the time – but most of us cannot live by unconscious choice alone.)

Some of those higher-level choices can be very difficult, both to make and to live by. I think that whether to love is one such choice, perhaps the highest-level choice there is. In this context I mean ‘love’ in an ethical sense – as an orientation of the self. Love as in ‘love thy neighbour’, as shorthand for the ethical imperative to ‘exercise practical compassion’ as in the Golden Rule.

But I do not think we have any reason for thinking that this choice (which includes the choice to see it as a choice which needs to be made) comes to us from anything outside us. We are not justified in thinking there was any teleological intent behind the fact that we evolved to have this choice and/or to be aware we have the choice.

It is possible that for some people, in order to make a choice like this, it is important to believe that the choice does come from something outside, and/or that there is or was a teleological intent behind the fact that we have this choice, and have evolved to have this choice. But my own position is that I think any belief like this is unjustified and irrelevant, and ultimately detracts from the choice itself.

Terry thought my explanation seemed like a justification after the event. I had obviously not been clear enough.

My point is not exactly that love has evolutionary value. Yes I would claim we have evolved by natural selection to be a kind of organism capable of choosing whether to love. But that does not mean ‘love is enough (of an imperative)’ is the same kind of thing as (and therefore comparable to) other potential principles which could also have an evolutionary foundation, eg ‘getting enough food is enough (of an imperative)’ or ‘procreating is enough (of an imperative)’ or even ‘enjoying life is enough (of an imperative)’.

Herbert Spencer

I am also absolutely not claiming an ethical imperative (as I intended ‘love is enough’ to be) could in any way be deduced from a statement of what was evolutionarily valuable. That would not only commit the naturalistic fallacy, but it could also commit to awkward implications like Herbert Spencer’s universal natural law of progress or worse.

Alternative imperatives like feeding and procreating are not ethical imperatives in the same way. All organisms feed (in the sense of taking in material and energy from their environment). All organisms procreate. An organism which mutated such that it did not feed or procreate would go extinct in a generation. This is true both of organisms which can make choices and those which cannot.

Humans however can make conscious behavioural choices, and they are also social and socially dependent creatures. (They have evolved to be able to make conscious behavioural choices and to be social and socially dependent creatures.)

In the context of human social existence as it is (and as it has evolved and developed to be) there is a spectrum of behaviours open to an individual human. An individual can be ‘selfish’ or ‘unselfish’ – or of course something in between. There is a whole continuum between two extreme ‘poles’, which we could describe as ‘sociopathic’ (at the selfish extreme) and ‘saintly’ (at the unselfish extreme).

At the ‘sociopathic’ end, the evidence suggests that a small proportion of individuals are just ‘made that way’ – it is not that they choose to be selfish to the point of callousness and cruelty, but they just do not have the capacity for empathy. They are unable to put themselves in another’s shoes.

Now although very few people are ‘saints’, very few are extreme sociopaths either. The vast majority of people feel at least some empathy, and act on it.

It would be intriguing – in fact quite horrifying – to speculate what human life would be like if all people were sociopaths and sociopathic behaviour were the norm. Or is it even possible to speculate, without coming to the rapid conclusion that human life would not only be hellish, but it would actually be impossible? The life of Homo sociopathicus would not be just a hellish but still feasible and therefore theoretically available variant of the life of Homo sapiens. It would be the life of an entirely different organism. It would be an organism without the capacity for empathy and, as a consequence, also without the capacity for trust.

If this thought experiment is sound, it suggests that humans have evolved to have the capacity for empathy and trust, just as they have evolved linguistic ability, consciousness and opposable thumbs. Empathy and trust are just part of what it is to be human.

This is not to say that somewhere ‘deep down’ we are perfect creatures with innocent generous selfless souls. Our conflicts are glaringly obvious. Every day our empathy and trust are compromised if not defeated.

But this, for me, is where the ethical imperative to love originates – from our complex, evolved nature. We are social and socially dependent. We have a capacity for empathy and trust. But there are other key components: we have memories; we recognise and remember each other as individuals. Trust and reputation are – or at least were – important to our survival. (I am touching here on the algorithms of reciprocal altruism, explored in greater depth in works of evolutionary psychology like Marc Hauser’s Moral minds [Abacus, 2008].)

We do not need an ethical imperative to feed or procreate – we have these motivations anyway. We have to have them in order to continue to exist. We can choose this or that meal, but we cannot in general ‘choose to feed’.

Procreation is slightly different: we can choose this or that mate, but as individuals we can also choose whether or not to procreate. There are circumstances where ‘to procreate or not’ could be an individual ethical choice – for example whether or not to bring another mouth to feed into an overpopulated world. But an individual decision to feed could also be an ethical one, eg if made by an anorexic child out of empathy for a desperate parent. But neither feeding nor procreation is an ethical imperative per se. Individual decisions like these are arguably exceptions to prove the rule: examples where feeding and procreation provide the context and content of specific ethical decisions which are actually about something else – eg caring for parents or the planet.

Arthur Rackham: Alberich

But the imperative to love, where ‘love’ = ‘exercise practical compassion’, is ethical through and through. In theory at least we can choose not to love at all, like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Far more commonly, we can choose whether to love in any particular circumstance, and we can choose how much to love. We can choose where to be on the continuum.

I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere (in The ethics of belief, and particularly in the sequence from Three wise mentalities to Not I my lord) what I see as important structural similarities between Kant’s Categorical Imperative, the Golden Rule, and the evolutionary algorithms of reciprocal altruism.

What I am here calling the ‘imperative to love’ is no more nor less than the Golden Rule. I think Kant was mistaken in dismissing the Golden Rule as banal (German trivial) and elevating the more abstract Categorical Imperative. He did this because he was eager to formulate a universal principle which held for all free rational beings rather than one which specifically applied to the kind of free rational beings which humans are (see for example Categorically imperative). But once we allow ourselves to make this move the universality of the Categorical Imperative can get its heart back. Evolutionary theory then suggests reasons for thinking that although we may find the imperative to love inside ourselves, we do not have to assume it was put there by a god.

Last word on the naturalistic fallacy. To say we find the imperative to love (the Golden Rule) inside ourselves is not to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It is not to deduce an ought from an is. We give ourselves the imperative. We do this because of what we are, and if we choose to give ourselves the imperative. Kant got the first bit wrong but the second bit hugely right.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Evolutionary, my dear Watson

What connects all these together?

For the answer (and yet another meander on that eternal mix of ethics, evolution and religious belief) see: http://amateuraficionado.com/2008/02/26/dr-watsons-woes/ and http://amateuraficionado.com/2009/11/23/the-scientific-determination-of-value/ and http://amateuraficionado.com/2009/12/01/human-dignity-derived-from-christian-teaching/.

Chimpanzee

Beetle

Cheetah

James D Watson

Jared Diamond: Guns Germs and Steel

South African Dutch Reformed Church

Whispers of the gods #6

Last time we introduced George Steiner’s imaginary ‘society of the primary’, a pristine utopia of creativity. It is a world where artists, writers and musicians do art, writing and music; and where performers interpret texts like plays and musical scores which need or lay themselves open to enactment.  The rest of us meanwhile take these artworks to heart but do not verbalise what we think about them for fear of being branded agents of journalism or academia.

Sixth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence¹ and Real presences²

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3; #4; and #5.

Steiner’s next move in Real Presences is almost dialectical. He has propounded his thesis – that this primary creativity innocent of ‘paraphrase, commentary [and] adjudication’ is at least conceivable and, if it were to exist, it would be a good thing. But an antithesis immediately rears its head:

All serious art, music and literature is a critical act. …[T]he construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. …It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.

But literature and the arts…also…embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

Bust of Virgil

‘[T]he inheritance and context to which they pertain’ is Steinerspeak for ‘previous works of art and literature’. So although journalists and academics will be forbidden from plying their trade of ‘high gossip’, Steiner has to let the writers and artists themselves do what comes naturally:

The intelligence of a major artist can be that of sovereign intellectuality. …How could this intelligence not also be critical of its own products and of its precedent? The readings, the interpretations and critical judgements of art, literature and music are of a penetrative authority rarely equalled by those offered from outside, by those propounded by the non-creator, …the reviewer, the critic, the academic.

He gives some examples:

Virgil reads, guides our reading of, Homer as no external critic can. The Divine Comedy is a reading of the Aeneid, technically and spiritually ‘at home’, ‘authorized’ …as no extrinsic commentary by one who is himself not a poet can be. The presence, visibly solicited or exorcised, of Homer, Virgil and Dante in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in the epic satire of Pope and in the pilgrimage upstream of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, is a ‘real presence’, a critique in action. Successively, each poet sets into the urgent light of his own purposes, of his own linguistic and compositional resources, the formal and substantive achievement of his predecessor(s)…

Joyce’s Ulysses is a critical experiencing of the Odyssey at the level of general structure, of narrative instruments and rhetorical particularity. Joyce… reads Homer… through the rival refractions not only of Virgil or of Dante, but through the sheer critical intelligence of his own inventions of echo, of his own over-reaching design of derivation. Unlike that of the critic or academic expositor, Joyce’s reading is answerable to the original precisely because it puts at eminent risk the stature, the fortunes of his own work.

Anna Karenina: 1935 film poster

He traces equivalent, if shorter, chains of re-creative reading from Middlemarch to Portrait of a Lady; from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina; from Marlowe’s Edward II to Brecht’s; from Strindberg’s Miss Julie to Genet’s The Maids.

He turns to translation, which is ‘interpretive in its very etymology’. (How could he ignore such a golden opportunity to scatter monikers left right and centre?)

Valéry’s transposition of Virgil’s Eclogues is critical creation. No critical study of the surge and limits of the baroque quite matches Roy Campbell’s translations from the Spanish of St John of the Cross. No literary criticism will educate our inner ear to the changing music of meaning in the English language as will a reading of successive versions of Homer in the translations by Chapman, Hobbes, Cowper, Pope, Shelley, T. E. Lawrence and Christopher Logue…

We then have painters writing about painting:

[T]he letters of Van Gogh or Cézanne… reveal what words can of the translation of matter into sense;…

We have painters painting about painting:

We have no more persuasive guidance to Ingres than in certain drawings and paintings by Dali. Our finest critic of Velàzquez is Picasso. …Similarly, Dürer’s rethinking of the Flemish masters, the patient meditation on the planes and volumes of Piero della Francesca in Cézanne, Manet’s performative investigations of Goya, Monet’s Turner, are art criticism and assessment enacted…

Paul Cézanne: The Card Players

And as for music, well:

The question as to whether anything meaningful can be said (or written) about the nature and sense of music lies at the heart of this essay. …[N]o epistemology, no philosophy of art can lay claim to inclusiveness if it has nothing to teach us about the nature and meanings of music. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s affirmation that “the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man” seems to me of sober evidence. …It may well be that man is man, and that man ‘borders on’ limitations of a peculiar and open ‘otherness’, because he can produce and be possessed by music.

When it talks of music, language is lame…

…Asked to explain a difficult étude, Schumann sat down and played it a second time…

Reading page after page of this makes me think of the Verification Principle. This was a criterion of meaning, propounded by AJ Ayer and the Vienna Circle of logical positivist philosophers. According to the Verification Principle, a proposition is only meaningful if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. Most if not all statements of metaphysics, for example, could be declared literally meaningless by applying this test.

The Verification Principle has had a chequered history, which I have no intention of repeating here. However one ‘killer argument’ has often been made against it. As the Verification Principle itself is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable, it must declare itself meaningless. By its own token it is metaphysical nonsense. It therefore refutes itself.

I am not claiming this first section of Real Presences is nonsense, or that it refutes itself. But at the very least it disparages itself – indeed it seems to hate itself.

Real Presences is not a work of art. So it is not Virgil to Homer nor Dante to Virgil nor Milton to Dante nor James Joyce to Homer nor Portrait of a Lady to Middlemarch nor Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary nor Dali to Ingres nor Picasso to Velàzquez. But it is a work of criticism – very broad and very academic criticism to boot. It is also a very broad and academic criticism of criticism. It therefore hovers between meta-text and meta-meta-text. By its own admission it is not ‘answerable’ to what it is about. It does not put its own ‘stature… [and] fortunes…at eminent risk’.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Real Presences would be among the first books the triumphant new regime of the ‘primary’ would toss on the fire.

Read on…

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #5

Last time I said I would try to explain what I meant by the ‘thread of self-loathing’ which seems to me to run through George Steiner’s Real presences.¹ Alas, although this post does a few practice runs, it doesn’t quite get there in one jump.

Fifth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence² and Real presences

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; #3 and #4.

George Steiner

And perhaps I should also qualify the claim. It seems a thread of self-loathing runs through the first part of Real presences, the section entitled A SECONDARY CITY. This is not because it cannot be said of the remaining sections. I need to qualify the statement because Real presences is a sequence of such indigestible blocks that I have to get this first bit out of the way so I can stop thinking about it.

It feels as if a chef from hell has served up my least favourite hors d’oeuvres, and he says he’s going to follow it with my least favourite main course and then my least favourite dessert.

The central theme of A SECONDARY CITY is a parable about a theoretically possible society of the ‘primary’, one where art and literature themselves are flourishing, but where all literary and artistic criticism, reviews and discursive interpretation have been banned. There would be no academic or journalistic writing about the meaning or value of particular works of art or literature. It would be a society

devoid, to the greatest possible extent, of ‘meta-texts’: this is to say [sic], of texts about texts (or paintings or music), of academic, journalistic and academic-journalistic – today, the dominant format – talk about the aesthetic. A city for painters, poets, composers, choreographers, rather than one for art, literary, musical or ballet critics and reviewers, either in the market-place or in academe.

But in such a society, literature, music and the arts would not ‘exist and evolve unexamined [or] unevaluated’. In a particularly opaque passage on ‘interpretation and hermeneutics’, Steiner separates (I think!) three related strands of meaning. Interpretation and/or hermeneutics can mean (i) deciphering and communicating meaning; (ii) translating ‘between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions’; or (iii) executing or acting out material ‘so as to give it intelligible life’.

It is this third sense which (I think!) Steiner isolates as ‘good’ interpretation/hermeneutics, which would still survive in his society of the primary, and which he also labels as

the enactment of answerable understanding, of active apprehension.

John Everett Millais: Ophelia

But let’s bring this down to earth. Here are some examples of this type-(iii) interpretation:

An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia. A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography. A violinist a Bach partita. In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation.

…Each performance of a dramatic text or musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible.

When I referred to this type-(iii) interpretation as ‘good’ interpretation I wasn’t going over the top:

Observe the moral aspect… Unlike the reviewer, the literary critic, the academic vivisector and judge, the executant invests his own being in the process of interpretation. His readings, his enactments of chosen meanings and values… are a commitment at risk, a response which is, in the root sense, responsible. To what, save pride of intellect or professional peerage, is the reviewer, the critic, the academic expert accountable?

Interpretive response under pressure of enactment I shall… call answerability. … We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological. [My emphases]

In the context of music, drama and ballet,

in respect of meaning and of valuation…, our master intelligencers are the performers.

…[This] is less evidently the case in regard to non-dramatic literature…

Well of course. Steiner waxes lyrical about the value and significance of reciting poetry and prose, and learning poetry in particular by heart. I’ll come to this in a moment. But surely there is a much simpler point to be made about acting and performing in general. It seems a bit arbitrary to draw a boundary round the written text of Hamlet and say ‘that is a work of art’, and then point to a particular actress’s performance of the character of Ophelia as an ‘act of penetrative response’ and therefore something different. It is not false exactly, but it is an odd way of looking at it.

It seems to be based on the assumption that a ‘work of art’ is by definition something produced by one and only one human being. Whereas it is just as valid to see the whole group performance of Hamlet as a ‘work of art’ with contributions by a set of people, including the now-deceased William Shakespeare.

Thelonious Monk

John Coltrane

Maybe this is exactly what Steiner is saying, but his language is so dense it is difficult to know. The thing is that in an actual performance there could be all shades of ‘penetrative response’ and ‘answerability’ and ‘responding responsibility’, depending on what is being performed and how it is being performed. An actor learning and then performing the lines from a pre-existing script is one kind. That same actor responding to a fellow actor’s performance is another kind – in theory, although it might be hard to separate the two. John Coltrane playing alongside Thelonious Monk, where both are playing a composition by Thelonious Monk himself or someone else; two jazz performers improvising together on a harmonic sequence borrowed from a song from the Great American Songbook; a cellist’s ‘penetrative response’ to both the score of Elgar’s Cello Concerto and what the particular conductor is getting out of this particular orchestra on this particular day; that conductor’s own ‘interpretive response’ to the cellist’s own performance; …

And so on. What I think I’m resisting is the idea that on the one hand we have the ‘work of art’ – which could be a painting or a sculpture or a poem or a novel or the text of a play – and on the other hand we have the ‘interpretive response’ to that work of art, which at its most direct could be a performance, but could also be private recitation or learning by heart. This idea seems to take it for granted that there is some general primary notion of a ‘work of art’, which can then secondarily be a painting, or a piece of music, or a poem and so on. And then one can have either an authentic ‘penetrative response’ of ‘answerability’ to this work of art, or the inferior ‘academic-journalistic paraphrase, commentary, adjudication’ or ‘meta-text’.

There may not even be a finite set of features which all ‘works of art’ have in common, and which things which are not works of art do not possess. There may rather be a set of overlapping ‘family resemblances’ in Wittgenstein’s sense.

So to pick up Steiner’s thread about learning by heart:

The private reader or listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force… What we know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness, a ‘pace-maker’ in the growth and vital complication of our identity…

Anna Akhmatova

He then gets political:

The issues here are political and social in the strongest sense. A cultivation of trained, shared remembrance sets a society in natural touch with its own past. What matters even more, it safeguards the core of individuality. What is committed to memory and susceptible of recall constitutes the ballast of the self. The pressures of political exaction, the detergent tide of social conformity, cannot tear it from us…

Under censorship and persecution, much of the finest in modern Russian poetry was passed from mouth to mouth and recited inwardly. The indispensable reserves of protest, of authentic record, of irony, in Akhmatova, in Mandelstam and in Pasternak, have been preserved and mutely published in the editions of personal memory.

In our own licensed social systems, learning by heart has been largely erased from secondary schooling and the habits of literacy. The electronic volume and fidelity of the computerized data bank and of processes of automatic retrieval will further weaken the sinews of individual memory… etc etc.

I am not convinced. The facts about memorised Russian poetry are interesting and significant in themselves, but I cannot see how they support the case he is trying to make. Was the poetry not memorised because that was the only way to preserve it? In what way is preservation by memory more authentic than preservation in print – had that been possible?

Horst Wessel and friends in 1929

And as for the lament on the passing of learning by heart in modern schooling – this seems as much a lament for lost innocence. To learn by heart means you do not have to analyse or understand for the text or melody to stick. This may or may not be a good thing depending on what it is that has been committed to memory. In some German hearts of the 1930s the most deeply engrained text and melody would have been those of the Horst-Wessel-Lied. I doubt George Steiner had this particular Kunststück in mind when he described the citizens of his imaginary city in these words:

The great majority, who are themselves neither writers, nor painters, nor composers, will, so far as it lies in their capabilities and freedom, be respondents, answerers in action. They will learn by heart, perceiving the elemental pulse of love implicit in that idiom; knowing that the ‘amateur’ is the lover (amatore) of that which [sic] he knows and performs…

I’ll try and get to the thread of self-loathing next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

² George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Whispers of the gods #4

On Art Garfunkel’s website there is a section he calls his LIBRARY which lists every book he has read since June 1968. By September 2009 the count was 1084. Not surprisingly there is a subsection for Favorites. 

Art Garfunkel

Fourth in a series responding to George Steiner’s Language and silence ¹ and Real presences ²

See also Whispers of the gods #1; #2; and #3.

As I plod through George Steiner’s Real presences for the second time – the book does not make Art Garfunkel’s 1084 by the way, let alone his Favorites – I find myself wishing George had chosen Art’s rather more economical technique to draw people’s attention to how erudite he is. Instead we get page after page of this sort of stuff:

…criticism is energised into creative responsibility when Racine reads and transmutes Euripides; when Brecht reconstrues Marlowe’s Edward II; when, in The Maids, Genet plays his sharp variations on the themes of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The most useful criticism I know of Shakespeare’s Othello is that to be found in Boito’s libretto for Verdi’s opera, and in Verdi’s response, both verbal and musical, to Boito’s suggestions…

…There are kindlings of discursive revelation in Plato, in Kierkegaard, in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Adorno. There is a rare force of suggestion in the definition proposed by Gioseffo Zarlino, the principal Renaissance theoretician of music: … [My emphases.]

I am tempted to say Steiner makes name-dropping into an art form. But that would be wrong. Art it is not.

It is hard to understand how someone who has read so widely through so many canons of world literature can manage to write so badly. First an almost trivial example:

…music entails differentiations between that which can be understood, this is to say, paraphrased, and that which can be thought and lived… [My emphases]

Christopher Marlowe - or someone very similar

What on earth is wrong with the simple four-letter word ‘what’? Surely ‘differentiations between what can be understood… and what can be thought and lived…’ is just that little bit more vernacular, and therefore just that little bit clearer? Plus of course, by replacing ‘that which’ with ‘what’ would have freed him to exchange ‘this is to say’ for that tiny bit more familiar ‘that is to say’:

…music entails differentiations between what can be understood, that is to say, paraphrased, and what can be thought and lived…

Far be it from me to subedit the work of a Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, but I wish somebody had.

It is beyond irony that a book cited by John Cornwell (see Whispers of the gods #3 and Touched by an angel #7) as evidence in favour of the ‘argument from beauty’ should be a work of such ugliness. Some examples:

…Not even the most rudimentary of structures of literacy and of musical reception is, one imagines, free from critical or didactic interposition…

…Periods, climates of culture, in which the exegetic and the critical dominate, are called ‘Alexandrine’ or ‘Byzantine’. These epithets refer to the prevalence of grammatological, editorial, didactic, glossarial, and judiciary techniques and ideals over any actual poetic-aesthetic creativity in Hellenistic Alexandria and in the Byzantium of the later Empire and Middle Ages…

…Manifold accommodations between aesthetic consumption and political-social power, between leisure and industrialization, are relevant…

…The transmutation of poetics into texts, that is to say, the lexical, grammatical, compositional analysis of a piece of literature, and the uses of such analysis towards rhetorical, civic and moral instruction, is as old as are the commentaries on Homer in ancient Greece…

Lafond: Sappho sings for Homer

And – sorry – I couldn’t resist this one:

The axioms of the transcendent in the arts of understanding and of judgement – axioms which this essay seeks to clarify – are invested in the overnight. [My emphasis]

Real presences is, needless to say, a painful read. It feels like being painted into Pseuds Corner. (Apologies to those unfamiliar with the UK magazine Private Eye.)

It is self-reflexive in the worst possible ways. For one thing it is its own entrance barrier to itself. It could have been at least 100 times clearer. Maybe its opacity was a deliberate marketing strategy – targeting just that elite minority clever enough and well-read enough to understand it?

But a curious thread of self-loathing also seems to run through it. I am not trying to claim that George Steiner hates himself. It is at level of the voice, and of the text itself.

I’ll try to explain what I mean next time.

References

¹ George Steiner, Language and silence, London, 1967.

² George Steiner, Real presences, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

© Chris Lawrence 2009.

Fashion cycle

According to popular legend the sudden decline in hat wearing by men started in 1960 as a result of John Kennedy.

John F Kennedy in 1959

Some say he went to his inauguration in 1960 without a hat. Others say he took it with him, but he didn’t wear it during the actual ceremony. Apparently neither he nor his brother Bobby liked wearing hats.

I certainly cannot recall ever seeing a picture of John Kennedy wearing a hat. And I was very aware of the watershed between the hatted Fifties and the hatless Sixties. But I had never put two and two together. In fact it was only when watching An Era of Style, one of the ‘featurettes’ included with the matchless Mad Men Series 2 DVD set, that I learned this most profound sociological fact.

I found myself remembering this today.

I found myself wondering what it was that had happened – maybe some time in the Seventies or the Eighties – to make cycling on the pavement in Britain shift from virtually if not literally illegal to the most done of done things?

Urban cyclist

When I was a child in the Fifties (when men wore hats) and Sixties (when they did not), riding a bike on the pavement was strictly verboten, something the omnipresent police took a seriously dim view of – like underage smoking. Maybe it’s because I’ve been out of the country for most of last 14 years, during which time there’s been a significant cycling revolution? – I mean people these days actually use bikes to get from A to B, as they did in the old days. They’re not just a foil to Lycra fashion. But at least 50% of the distance from A to B is travelled on the pavement.

So, what was the Kennedy moment? What caused the pavement-cycling watershed? Was it a ground-breaking Act of Parliament? Or do today’s invisible police just turn a collective blind eye?

© Chris Lawrence 2009.