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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Daniel Green has taken upon himself the not especially enviable task of spending time with Steven Pinker:"Pinker comes close to suggesting that any art that does not confirm the hypothesis that art originates in other human attributes--adaptations that helped us to navigate and control what Pinker and the evolutionary psychologists he cites like to call our “ancestral environment”--is perforce bad and irresponsible art. But how could this be? Why should otherwise serious and creative works and art or literature be disparaged because they allegedly do not reflect the use of faculties developed to confront conditions our ancestors confronted hundreds of thousands of years ago?
Pinker has elsewhere discussed the fallacy of thinking we cannot in some cases overcome or simply ignore the prescriptions issued to us by our genetic inheritance. Referring specifically to the biological command to bear children, Pinker advises that it is possible for us to metaphorically inform our imperious genes to “go jump in the lake” (How the Mind Works)... At the very least, it seems worth asking why, if we are capable of redirecting “drives” as powerful as these, we cannot also similarly modify, even ignore, the effects of those biological prompts Pinker considers the ultimate sources of art: “hunger for status,” the “pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments,” as well as “the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends.” "
It always seems to me that the problems of Darwinian aesthetics are not dissimilar to those of an earlier school of literary theory. In Freudian analysis, the difficulty is presented that there is no consistent and accurate methodology for determining whether aspects of a text are the product of the author's unonscious mind, their conscious mind or whether their presence is largely coincidental or even illusory. The same problem manifests itself for Darwinian approaches, whereby no equivalent methodology exists for determining whether aspects of an artwork are consistent with the principles of evolutionary pyschology or are some form of cultural aberration. Neither our genes nor our unconscious are likely to be especially forthcoming on this subject; just-so stories are less than helpful in either case.Labels: Aesthetics, Art
posted by Richard 6:52 pm
