Another Year, Another Manifesto is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, January 06, 2006. It is part of The Epistemology Exhibition.
Another manifesto.
I have, for the third year in a row, been convinced by my friends and fellow travelers to take part in a mad push of creativity for the month of January. This year, we must each produce a piece of writing every Friday that runs to around 1000 words (the first time, we each wrote a short piece a day, the second, a piece for each weekday; we’re growing more sensible with time).
In each of the previous two years, I started with an essay: the first year with a piece called The Polymath Manifesto, which was an outline of my ideas about the nature of art and the various reasons why Snow’s two-culture theory should be jettisoned by a new wave of polymaths; the second year began with another manifesto that was, in retrospect, a defensive work that, although sincere, struggled to justify my own creative endeavors while acknowledging my science education (it has since been removed from this body of work). I will begin this year, not with the short story I had intended, but with yet another essay, this time on my (hopefully) deeper understanding of the artistic impulse.
A story will appear here next week.
Machines for Telling Stories
Monkeys, like men, have an unusually high ratio of brain weight to body mass compared to other mammals. It is likely that early monkeys developed these large brains first to support detailed color vision — a necessity given their fructuous diet — and, later, to cope with the complexities of social living, including communication with, and an ability to make judgments concerning the trustworthiness of, other monkeys. Subsequent simians, including hominids, show a continued refinement of both symbolic communication and, in higher primates, the development of a “theory of mind” that allows one to speculate as to the internal motivations of another.
1. Le Ton beau de Marot, by Douglas Hofstadter, suggests that every act of communication involves multiple steps of translation, first from the speaker’s internal symbol set to an external linguistic one, then into the listener’s own internal symbol set.
2. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, by Robin Dunbar.
3. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker.
In this way our minds became machines for telling stories, first to ourselves in order to model the world and speculate as to the consequences of our actions, then to others in order to pass on ideas1, build trust and seduce potential sexual partners, sharing intimate stories as a linguistic addenda to much older primate grooming rituals2. The story told by our genes was slowly augmented by the stories told by our minds until hominids had supplemented the glacial process of adaption through biological mutation with the rapid process of cultural mutation, elevating the memetic over the genetic3.
4. The Symbolic Species, Terrence Deacon.
The symbolic and narrative powers developed in service of linguistic communication have combined with our powerful vision and clever hands to enabled us to tell stories in many non-verbal forms, from campfire songs to cave paintings to the cinema4. We’ve become a race of makers; so deep is this idea in our self-conception that every culture tells a story about being made — we understand the world through construction, thus we must have a maker in our image to understand our own existence. In the modern era we’ve taken the next logical step, creating sophisticated machines that understand languages of our devising in order that we might recite linguistically-framed narratives to them.
Misfit Monkeys
Modern humans have been more or less biologically stable for at least two hundred thousand years, and possibly for considerably longer. Culture has, during the same period, mutated wildly. Another way of saying this is that the natural impulses to which we are subject have remained constant while the social rules to which we are expected to conform have changed, often in ways that conflict directly with our natural impulses. The heat from this friction is the energy that powers artistic expression.
Some members of any population will have a greater difficulty squelching human nature in the name of getting along. Those, for instance, who have more than the sanctioned number (or the wrong kinds) of sexual partners, give in to the urge to pummel offensive persons, decorate themselves in elaborate and unorthodox ways, cannot abide the working environment in which a conventional living is to be made, or otherwise sentence themselves to real or virtual social gulags.
5. “The poet is a liar who always tells the truth.” — Jean Cocteau
One mechanism by which a troublemaker can avoid running afoul of society’s punitive apparatus is to channel his dissatisfaction into the creation of instruments of communication. The artist, in exploring his own difficulty at coping with the cognitive dissonance caused by living within awkward social constraints, tells stories that help him to understand his internal world and the ways in which it is at odds with the external one5. This process has a number of socially positive consequences, including the conversion of potential madmen and criminals into artists — we can only speculate as to how much better off Europe would have been had Hitler been accepted into art school — and the provision of a running critique of society’s collective foolishness and hypocrisy.
The old adage that there are no new stories is more or less true, but if art is to life as criticism is to art, we must update and re-tell our collective stories as our conditions change. The satire of Jonathan Swift became necessary at a time when Cervantes’s work no longer fit the circumstances, while George Saunders and David Foster Wallace perform much the same function for modern America.
The body of an artist’s work can be taken, more or less, as a continuing commentary on his relationship with the world. It is the good fortune of some few of these outcasts that in deeply exploring a very personal brand of dissatisfaction, stories that resonate more broadly may be uncovered.