One issue I've encountered from people confronted with my ideas is the question of whether or not I'm trying to 'reduce' the arts to a kind of formal framework and, in doing so, saying that the emotion, beauty, power and total experience of art can be explained in scientific terms, with possible artistic forms being laid out by certain formula describing the structures they must take. I will say flatly that I am not attempting to do anything of this kind. If anything, I hope that my ideas may actually provide reason to free art from being a slave to particular codes of formal patterns, by showing how these patterns might arise from mental causes, and hence possibly reveal that the specifics of these forms may not necessarily be the only way to achieve meaningful art in a given medium. As an example, the ability to comprehend blank verse and 'free' verse arose from the same cause as far as I can tell, and I would not place a meaningful distinction between them aside from one having a specific tradition and history along with its tendency to have more regular structure than the other. To make it clear, the structure that arises from the mental processes that enable these kinds of poetry, or similar structures in music, is not arbitrary, I don't believe you simply make up such structures on a whim and train the human mind to perceive them as meaningful through shear repetition, and the kinds of structures that people do perceive as being able to convey meaningful art are naturally shared in common due to the similar physical forms and feelings our minds may share (assuming there is, as there is good reason to believe, a fundamental connection between physical form and mental feeling [1]). But this does not mean that art is 'objective' or has any absolute value beyond our subjective experience of it. Our individual experiences of art may be valuable in themselves, but any art object, text or score simply is and can only be said to be good in that individuals may have the appropriate perception, feeling and mental structures that allow them to experience the art as being good.
I resent over analysis of art, including forced formulas and purposeless reductions of the actual art experience into smaller, limited parts that ignore the complexity of human experience for the sake of fitting things into a predefined box in order to pretend their nature is simpler than it is. If anything, I want to explore and make understood the issues I present specifically in order to guard against such practices. Many people who are temporarily incapable of understanding certain forms for reasons they may not be aware of may be tempted to indulge in over analysis because they have been informed that there is a kind of complexity in certain works they they realize they can't perceive, an which they aren't yet sure of how to arrive at an understanding of. Because of this, and because they place trust in those who they believe have superior insight to them, they might also reasonably trust the analytic practices of those who can perceive things they can't, without realizing that they lack the prerequisites needed to understand such art. But, because they have no authentic experience of what these practices are actually describing, they may end up placing too much weight in a mechanical, pre-memorized comprehension of these 'rules' they don't know the reason for, without understanding what purpose they serve or if they really are rules at all (rather than). This is exactly what I believe can be overcome through and understanding how various modes of thought processing differ (possibly through understanding the nature of modal faculties). People should be freed from dogma prescribed blindly, even if it may be otherwise well-intentioned.
No comments:
Post a Comment