What is your Aesthetic Philosophy?

[waalkwriter]

I promised to make this thread, so here goes. Whew, gotta admit I am bit a worn out by the energy all those replies on the The Road thread have worn me out, but I think I have enough to make my point well here.

Basically this is a thread that sort of cuts down to the central issue that every discussion and debate had here centers around: what do you believe art is, what do you think it should do, and why do you think that. Cutting away all the silly extraneous discussions that get lost in simply arguing styles such as post-modernism or minimalism or romanticism or modernism of all these extraneous, and frankly meaningless trappings.

So how do I start...perhaps I will start by getting a bit Faulknerian, as he often made a statement with a similar gist: I believe the point of the writer is to lie, and do it so convincingly the reader doesn't know or care really that he's being lied to.

This is where Umberto Eco falls flat when he says, "You cannot say 'I love you madly', but you can say, 'According to Barbara Streisand I love you madly.' You certainly can, that's what writing is.

Art is solely about lying, lying to the reader that you came up with what he is reading and didn't just assemble it from a montage of randomness in your own life. You are lying to the reader that some basic element of your plot is new, or is your own, you are lying to them that a character is something you made up and not just some interpretation of yourself or rewriting of a character that struck either in fiction or real life. Without the lie there is no art, only science, so frankly what Eco and post-modernists do, for me, threatens the very purity and existence of art itself by trying to remove the lie from art and to focus on removing the lie and writing to let the reader know along the way that the whole thing is a lie, that it is always a lie.

But it's also about destroying reality. A French New Novelist, Robbe-Grillet I believe, was obsessed with the fact that if he used the word mountain, he couldn't use it to give a specific meaning, that each reader would see it differently. He could not fundamentally get over the fact that the word "mountain" is not a mountain and never will be, (in a way it is just part of the lie).

In doing so he missed what is really beautiful about it; that it is not a mountain, but a basic packet of information, a basic bit of programming that cannot be simplified anymore, it is a deconstruction of a mountain, a mountain is destroyed in the eye of the writer into the word and the recreated in the eye of the reader in infinitesimal different ways which is so beautiful because the word is unbound, unzipped, the basic information unfolded and it becomes a billion different combination's, this is what makes art so vast, so infinite in its depth. Art is, through the lie, destruction and then creation again, creation in so many ways, countless ways, ways that don't really matter, (and this is the really cool thing). This is something that truly touches me on personal level about art and what art does, so of course you should have no trouble understand why I am passionate in attacking any mode of thought that threatens it.

Art is destruction, very importantly it is destruction. To quote the Apostle Paul, "Life is meaningless" and I am using that quote for differing reasons than the original context. Life is a somewhat base, simplistic, and monotonous exercise in futility, art is just something we've created to help us cope with the fact that as we go along there is no ultimate beauty in reality, in what can be quantified, that there is no happiness in understanding everything or anything. I always declare quite proudly that I want to know everything but understand nothing at all.

Art is something that inserts a temporary feeling of meaning, a temporary collection of chaos into organized patterns. It doesn't matter what that feeling is, how it's done, what the interpretation of it, just so long as it does it, beyond that nothing else is important within it. It's so important to be reminded that we are human, to, in this increasingly desensitized age make us feel alive to help us once more join Icarus and transcend the world before falling back to it, to help us transcend not only ourselves, but the ordinary limitations of our normal feelings and experiences.

Life is a box, the purpose of art is postulate what is outside of that box and help us cope with being stuck in it.

Therefore I don't need writing that fails this transcendental task, this elevating task. I read to find some real people, people in some way idealized, made to transcend their petty day to day versions, and find some plot where action has meaning where place has meaning. I write for much the same purpose; to try to create this, find some new pocket of this, make a personal exploration into trying to find something greater than what is on the surface of our daily lives. And again, to return to the central theme, thus the lie.

Literature will only come to be more important I feel, because as Religion slowly dies literature will replace it as a means of coping. Literature will be a venue for people to find something that gives them hope their lives mean something, that they will accomplish something universal with their lives, that their solitary existence can have an impact and elevate them above the masses of people that surround them. So that man will not cry to an empty and cold universe of gravity and stars and space and energy locked in a unending passionless cycle, a lone voice crying in the depths to unhearing ears and echoing in the everlasting darkness of being.

So to try to stop wandering along with my thoughts, I am a hopeless romantic in my view of art. Therefore I am very antagonistic to whatever movements I view as avant garde, as more interested in ulterior aspects rather than the end result, the creation of something meaningful, something that makes the viewer feel more alive, feel refreshed and ready again to turn his eye to the vast horizon of reality in all its many shades of gray.

This philosophy is very important to me, so I do argue it passionately where I feel it is threatened. Indeed I wrote an entire bildungsroman when I was an high school dealing pretty much with defining an artistic outlook I could not grasp at the time.

Perhaps this stringent and militant romanticism is hopelessly out of place in a modern age of skepticism, restraint, and rationality. It seems odd, or maybe it is the reason, that a person like me, for whom the rationality of an opinion or a debate is the absolute key to its validity and existence, should view art as an escape valve for that, art as something purely beautiful, purely emotion and feeling and displaying universal human truths. Something to know but not have the slightest clue where to begin understanding.

All this philosophy requires of art is that it be in good intentions, as long as it doesn't fail to bring about that honest emotion and feeling of life, or doesn't fail to mock the very institution it is, it is fine by me, even if it's not a piece I enjoyed I have no problem with it. I think this is the distinction that wasn't clear in the several recent discussions had on the issue.

Because literature should be this:

"I turn on my side and look at the ocean look into its waters. It’s black, liquid ink filled the pens of countless imaginations, of a million wonderful dreams of adventure and escape dreams of a true reality a reality where the monotony of the understood could be lost within danger and mystery, fodder for a million fantasies, once...when there was such thing as mystery."

I will leave it at this, not perfect but it covers the basic extent of it, the rest can be more thoroughly discussed in future discussion if there is any. I'm interested to here about your philosophies on art, how they compare, how you would agree or disagree, etc. Because the only way we can ever more past really, I think, just saying, "Okay, you're wrong and you're wrong" etc, and trying to find ubermeinung is to break down the innermost feelings of literature and simply come to terms of understanding with the differing personalities here, otherwise it really is just beating around the bush and it can only be dealt, I feel, through this sort of thing...sorry, it is too late and I'm really having trouble keeping this all together for a worthy conclusion, so I'm just gonna cut it here, good as any place, shouldn't keep rambling....

So, your thoughts?

[Igu Soni]

Criticism of your view of Eco: we've become so well-read that the only way to lie to us convincingly is to admit a small lie and make a bigger one in the hidden machinations inside.

More to come, in all probability, but not today.

[Galatea92]

So, your thoughts?

I don't have an aesthetic philosophy. I just like reading.

[waalkwriter]

Well reading and writing are so important to me that I have made the effort to find and search myself and what makes me tick, not to understand persay, but to know it at least, and it's been a rough task because its so buried in emotion and vagueness, but it's been one of the most rewarding things I've done, to come to know myself and form a larger outlook on literature and art in general.

It seems completely natural to have a view of beauty when you spend most of your passions being preoccupied by that beauty.

I don't know Iqu, take Tarrantino for isntance, a filmmaker, his movies are complete lies, every step of the way, but what makes them wonderful is that they don't care they are lying, they are so careless and bold that they can even lie about the small things and make you overlook the lie completely and be astonished by it as if it were truth.

[Eric]

I don't have an aesthetic philosophy. I just like reading.

An eminently sensible approach to literature in this age of pseudo-intellectual theories. As I have said on another thread, maybe the Hermeneutics School has something to offer. But otherwise a lot of so-called literary theory is sterile posturing.

As neither the USA or UK really have very much input into their fish tank of thought from beyond Anglophonia-Xenophobia, we English-speakers have hardly any access to what the majority of the world thinks. A philosophy as arid as Arizona, or as wet as the Lake District, is hardly anything to boast about.

[Mirabell]

An eminently sensible approach to literature in this age of pseudo-intellectual theories. As I have said on another thread, maybe the Hermeneutics School has something to offer. But otherwise a lot of so-called literary theory is sterile posturing.

As neither the USA or UK really have very much input into their fish tank of thought from beyond Anglophonia-Xenophobia, we English-speakers have hardly any access to what the majority of the world thinks. A philosophy as arid as Arizona, or as wet as the Lake District, is hardly anything to boast about.

I never know whether you're ironic or really ignorant?

In this case, I suspect that 99% of the theory you so abhor (you fail to give descriptions) is actually French or German theory, first imported en masse during the 1960s. One of the best and major literary theorists in the US is a Belgian ?migr? (now dead), and from the Frankfurt School (named after Frankfurt, Germany), to Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, to name just a handful, those are all Europeans. Spivak and the wonderful Bhabha are Indian. Etc.

In fact, in my experience, the critics who share your attitude are most often the insular ones, trying to find "the American strain" in lit crit. A terribly dull, vague, sentimental waffle about literature, purity and Art (mark the capital A) ensues, that could lead weaker souls than I to re-instate book-burning. It's in theory where you find international interaction more than in your area of, oh, why not call it 'thought'.

[waalkwriter]

Well I suppose I one of the suckers who is obsessed with art. Not Art, not "aht" just art. I don't think I have ever gotten over studying Tolstoy and other romantics like Shelley and Rimbaud and Whitman. Except I'd say I tend to be a lot more bitter than they were, and I don't contain any sympathy or liking for religion.

[Refus de Sejour]

On the subjective level of personal taste, I value texts that generate a sense of physical space. This sensation is difficult to describe, but I?ll do my best; often when reading a narrative I get the impression that the text is opening out onto a physical landscape that extends beyond the words on the page, a landscape in which it is possible for me to exist somehow on an imaginative level. In a scene set on a river for example, I?ll feel that even those areas of the river not described in the text are somehow accessible to me ? as are the landscapes beyond the river, which the writer may not even mention. In a way it?s similar to dreaming; I both ?observe? the events described and myself become a character in (and beyond) them.

Neurological studies have shown that, when reading a description of a physical action, sections of the reader?s brain will light up as if the reader were performing that action. That seems a nice biological illustration of how reading enables special kinds of imaginative experience.

These personal aesthetic values segue into a more objective interest in reading in general. Just the act of reading itself - that fact that we can fluently transform little black squiggles into concepts and images - is incredible; the different ways that we read different texts is even more remarkable. Because of this, I?m not interested in subscribing to normative theories of what literature should be; I?m interested in what it is, in all its variety. For that matter, I don?t attach any intrinsic value to the term ?literature? - I?m just as interested in journalistic modes of writing, say, as I am in literary fiction.

Or to put it another way:

[waalkwriter]

Hmm, interested, so you are a big fan of suggested space? Are you fan a of noir and and Dashiell Hammett?

[Refus de Sejour]

Not particularly - haven't read any Hammett in years.

I think this experience of space isn't really tied to any specific style, it's more a symptom of me being absorbed in a text. I suspect many books that do this for me wouldn't necessarily do it for other readers.

[Igu Soni]

I don't know Iqu, take Tarrantino for isntance, a filmmaker, his movies are complete lies, every step of the way, but what makes them wonderful is that they don't care they are lying, they are so careless and bold that they can even lie about the small things and make you overlook the lie completely and be astonished by it as if it were truth.

He references, using cinematic methods that you might not notice. A lie, but a big lie behind a small truth.

Also, one thing you should know:
The letter that looks like 'q' is the one that sounds like a synonym for 'line'.
The letter that looks like 'g' is the one that sounds like the exclamation Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz would make.
Now, read my name.

I hate over-theorising about art, Art or "aht". Surely it's accepted as an attempt to communicate via appeal to emotions?
Derrida in particular rouses my ire, though qualifiedly because I'm not particularly acquainted with his work, because he seems to be saying that we should abandon whatever we feel art is communicating to us and try to 'deconstruct' it. Criticism is not a science.

[Bjorn]

"To read makes our speaking English good."

[saliotthomas]

When beauty is abstracted, then ugliness has been implied; When good is abstracted then evil has been implied, *noise of genitals scratching*........*fart*.........*more genitals scratching*........... - Tao de Ch'ing

[Mirabell]

Criticism is not a science.

Not a natural science. But in German, for example, the discipline is called "Literature science" (Literaturwissenschaft) and the humanities are the Geisteswissenschaften.

[Igu Soni]

Not a natural science. But in German, for example, the discipline is called "Literature science" (Literaturwissenschaft) and the humanities are the Geisteswissenschaften.

Let me modify that: Criticism is not a natural science.

[Mirabell]

Let me modify that: Criticism is not a natural science.

Good thing Derrida doesn't treat it as one, then. The scientific method is largely absent from his work, mostly because he understands that the knowledge it produces doesn't fit the subject.

[Liam]

This is where Umberto Eco falls flat when he says, "You cannot say 'I love you madly', but you can say, 'According to Barbara Streisand I love you madly.'

Wrong Barbara. Cartland, not Streisand. Young man, learn your stuff, !

On the subjective level of personal taste, I value texts that generate a sense of physical space. This sensation is difficult to describe, but I?ll do my best; often when reading a narrative I get the impression that the text is opening out onto a physical landscape that extends beyond the words on the page, a landscape in which it is possible for me to exist somehow on an imaginative level.

Refus, what with being a Kiwi, I wonder if you've ever heard of Gerald Murnane, who is my favorite living Australian writer? He's all about those mental landscapes, although oftentimes he's more busy analyzing than describing them.

[Eric]

Mirabell, theories I hate or am ignorant about could well be German. But I don't dislike them because they are German or European. I've read things in a good Swedish series, now defunct, called Kontrakurs, collated by someone called Kurt Aspelin. I thought that the essays would do me good in the 1970s when I first tried to read them. But maybe I just didn't have the patience. Or my Swedish was not yet good enough to grasp the essentials.

I always thought you were rather a logical kind of person. But I fail to understand what you say here:

In this case, I suspect that 99% of the theory you so abhor (you fail to give descriptions) is actually French or German theory, first imported en masse during the 1960s. One of the best and major literary theorists in the US is a Belgian ?migr? (now dead), and from the Frankfurt School (named after Frankfurt, Germany), to Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, to name just a handful, those are all Europeans. Spivak and the wonderful Bhabha are Indian. Etc.

Who's your Belgian? Paul de Man? I'm afraid I've never read any of his work, so I know nothing about it. The ones I've tried are Marcuse, Luk?cs, Lotman (he has some interesting things to say - but I'm biased, he lived in Estonia), Eco (about James Bond), Derrida, a little Barthes, Bhabha on postcolonialism and a few others. I'm willing to give any of them a try again. But I just didn't get anything out of them when I read them years ago. Even Lotman seemed to be good at analysing texts at a close level, but I couldn't grasp any overall scheme he was trying to build up (if he was). I also tried a Russian or two and a Czech. I don't remember those names without Googling.

[Liam]

In fact, in my experience, the critics who share your attitude are most often the insular ones, trying to find "the American strain" in lit crit. A terribly dull, vague, sentimental waffle about literature, purity and Art (mark the capital A) ensues, that could lead weaker souls than I to re-instate book-burning.

There's also the philological approach (more appropriate for Classical, medieval and Renaissance literatures, naturally) where you pay extra-careful attention to language and its "historicity" and try to figure out why the author/poet chose to write in a certain style.

Why is it, for instance, that Chaucer's The Reeve's Tale, is the only piece in the collection that is written in a Northern dialect of English, as opposed to the standard London-influenced English of the rest of the tales? How much of the language in Beowulf is actually pagan, how much Christian? Why does D. H. Lawrence choose to describe sexual intercourse using distinctly ecclesiastical metaphors (rapture, grace, ascent, light, etc)?

To a degree, philology in this case becomes tied up with New Historicism and Cultural Studies, but that's still better and more productive, I think, than to sit there and obsess about the mirror stage or the "always-already deconstructive nature of every text" ad nauseam.

[Liam]

I also tried a Russian or two and a Czech. I don't remember those names without Googling.

The Russian may well be Mikhail Bakhtin. A tough cookie, that one, but he did write a few things on medieval literature that I like. I've never read his long study of Dostoyevsky though.

Who's the Czech? You sure you're not talking about Zizek or Todorov?