Our Impulse Toward Anthropomorphism

‘Animal Farm’, as imagined in the 1954 film, actually described human politics.

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last, the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

    ‘Who are YOU?’ said the Caterpillar.

    This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I--I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

    ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’

    ‘I can't explain MYSELF, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, is just one example of the book’s rich portrayal of nonhumans — like the Caterpillar — all of whom exhibit humanlike properties and behaviours. A literary device that is also a form of anthropomorphism — from the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘human’, and morphe, meaning form or shape. Humans have a long history of attributing both physical and mental human qualities to a wide array of things, ranging from animals to inanimate objects and gods. Such anthropomorphism has been common even since the earliest mythologies.

 

Anthropomorphism has also been grounded in commonplace usage as metaphor. We ‘see’ agency, intentionality, understanding, thought, and humanlike conduct in all sorts of things: pets, cars, computers, tools, musical instruments, boats, favourite toys, and so forth. These are often items with which we grow a special rapport: and that we soon regard as possessing the deliberateness and quirkiness of human instinct. Items with which we ‘socialise’, such as through affectionate communication; to which we appoint names that express their character; that we blame for vexing us if, for example, they don’t work according to expectations; and that, in the case of gadgets, we might view as extensions of our own personhood.

 

Today, we’ve become accustomed to thinking of technology as having humanlike agency and features — and we behave accordingly. Common examples in our device-centric lives include assigning a human name to a car, robot, or ‘digital personal assistant’. Siri pops up here, Alexa there… This penchant has become all the more acute in light of the ‘cleverness’ of computers and artificial intelligence. We react to ‘capriciousness’ and ‘letdowns’: beseeching a car to start in the bitter cold, expressing anger toward a smart phone that fell and shattered, or imploring the electricity to come back on during a storm. 

 

Anthropomorphism has been deployed in art and literature throughout the ages to portray natural objects, such as animals and plants, as speaking, reasoning, feeling beings with human qualities. Even to have conscious minds. One aim is to turn the unfamiliar into the comfortably familiar; another to pique curiosity and achieve dramatic effect; another to build relatability; another to distinguish friend from foe; and yet another simply to explain natural phenomena.

Take George Orwell’s Animal Farm as another example. The 1945 book’s characters, though complexly nuanced, are animals representing people, or perhaps, to be more precise, political and social groups. The cast includes pigs, horses, dogs, a goat, sheep, a raven, and chickens, among others, with human language, emotions, intentions, personalities, and thoughts. The aim is to warn of the consolidation of power, denial of rights, manipulation of language, and exploitation and control of the masses associated with authoritarianism. The characters are empathetic and relatable in both positive and flawed ways. Pigs, so often portrayed negatively, indeed are the bad guys here too: they represent key members of the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik leadership. Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin, Snowball represents Leon Trotsky, and Squealer represents Vyacheslav Molotov. 

Children's stories, familiar to parents having read to their young children, abound with simpler examples. Among the many favourites are the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. Such stories often have didactic purposes, to convey lessons about life, such as ethical choices, while remaining accessible, interpretable, and affable to young minds. The use of animal characters aids this purpose.

 

More generally, too, the predisposition toward anthropomorphism undergirds some religions. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods appear in assorted artifacts, thousands of years old, unearthed by archeologists across the globe. This notion of gods possessing human attributes came to full expression among the ancient Greeks.

 

Their pantheon of deities exhibited qualities of both appearance and thought resembling those of everyday people: wrath, jealously, lust, greed, vengeance, quarrelsomeness, and deception. Or they represented valued attributes like fertility, love, war, wisdom, power, and beauty. These qualities, both admirable and sometimes dreadful, make the gods oddly approachable, even if warily.

 

As to this, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in his wide-reaching reproach of religions, struggled to come to grips with the faithful lauding and symbolically putting deities on pedestals, all the while incongruously ascribing flawed human emotions to them.

 

In the fifth century BCE, the philosopher Xenophanes also recoiled from the practice of anthropomorphism, observing, ‘Mortals deem that the gods are begotten as they are [in their own likeness], and have clothes like theirs, and voice and form’. He underscored his point about partiality — modeling deities’ features on humans’ features by observing that ‘Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that they are pale and red-haired’. Xenophanes concluded that ‘the greatest God’ resembles people ‘neither in form nor in mind’.

 

That said, this penchant toward seeing a god in humans’ own likeness, moored to familiar humanlike qualities, rather than as an unmanifested, metaphysical abstraction whose reality lies forever and inalterably out of reach (whether by human imagination, definition, or description), has long been favoured by many societies.

 

We see it up close in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, where it says: ‘So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them’, as well as frequently elsewhere in the Bible. Such reductionism to human qualities, while still somehow allowing for God to be transcendent, makes it easier to rationalise and shed light on perplexing, even inexplicable, events in the world and in our lives.

 

In this way, anthropomorphism is a stratagem for navigating life. It reduces reality to accessible metaphors and reduces complexity to safe, easy-to-digest analogues, where intentions and causes become both more vivid and easier to make sense of. Above all, anthropomorphism is often how we arrive at empathy, affiliation, and understanding.

 

How to Defy Weaponised Media Narratives

Posted by Jeremy Dyer

‘The 2000 Yard Stare’

A 1944 illustration by Thomas C. Lea III

depicting World War II.

It’s just bad news, it will pass, right? But why does it make me feel so depressed? Why does it eat away at my peace and happiness? Why do I constantly feel this uneasiness? Why can I not shake off this feeling of impending doom? You are mercilessly and relentlessly pressured to adopt one of the binary positions of ideological narratives.  Ideological violence is in fact a war, with real-world consequences. 

At this time in history, suicides are rising – I won’t post the references, but it is logical. So. For those people, the stress became unbearable. I saw someone have a major Coronaphobia freak out at the grocery store a few days ago. What is unquestionably all around, is:

Personal financial fear

Concern for the future of the world

Rampaging looting, stealing, and killing

Stress around lockdowns and regulations

Lack of normal outlets such as gym, restaurants, and social gatherings

A media onslaught of negativity

‘Doomscrolling’ 

You can look after yourself, stop watching the news – or schedule a time for it – eat healthy, start a plan for a better job, cut your social media time wastage, exercise in some other way, chat with positive friends ... yet in the face of the war, it is a daily effort and discipline, isn’t it? It is exactly like fighting a mental war every day. 

You war with the things you have to do physically. 

You war with the people you come into contact with (I was a teacher, so I know).

And then there is that fuzzy, insidious pyscho-ideological war. On this last point, I am referring to the tsunami of negative, emotionally-driven ‘news’ and more importantly the ‘narratives’ (ideological viewpoints) that inform such news. Memes, articles, sound bites, and so on.

What is going on?

It is this ideological war that drives most of the depressing news – 5G is killing you, you are a racist, the planet is dying, history is all wrong, magical love is the answer to everything, coconut and cannabis oil cure all illness, socialism is better than capitalism, the normals must worship the weirdos and awfuls, another virus is being created to kill us, a murderous Uhuru is coming, vegans are better than carnivores, BDSM is better sex, world food is running out, all GM food is poisonous, the government controls you, the media is all lies ... 

It’s a long list covering a lot of issues.

The thing to note is that each of these messages is absolute and crystalised – very little shades of grey in any of them. Each intrusive narrative is polarised, like the Dems and ’Pubs in the USA. You are mercilessly and relentlessly pressured to adopt one of the binary positions in each of these ideological narratives. They are now ‘weaponised’, and they seek to enforce compliance in you – join the riots, burn the 5G towers, boycott Chinese goods, buy a gun, eat only vegetables, stock up on food, hate men, hate women, wear a face-mask, don’t wear a face mask ...

Doubt, fear, uncertainty ... depression and anxiety. This is logical when confronted with ‘evidence’ from both sides of these aggressive narratives. The whiplash from the changing evidence of experts alone – on life, the universe, and everything – leaves us all in need of physiotherapy.

‘What is revolt?’ asked Albert Camus. ‘Simply defined, it is the Sisyphean spirit of defiance in the face of the Absurd … in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance.’ What kind of defiance remains, then, which will not find you caught up in the war? 

One has to either sift through all these narratives, to find one’s position on any number of issues… (Some people are able to do this, but many are too ADD or incapable. Some choose to believe the fictions of conspiracy theories instead, because it is simpler and easier. Facts and science are irrelevant after all, only opinion matters in what you choose to believe. Wow, talk about dangerous.) 

Or ...

Cultivate an attitude of defiance! 

Look after your own wellbeing. Mind, body and spirit. Reject mental poison.

Do the things that make you happy.

Pursue your meaning.

Say to yourself :

Siss China!

Siss the face masks!

Siss the vegans!

Siss MAGA!

Siss Antifa!

Siss the 5G towers! 

Go fishing. Go swimming. Get seriously sceptical. Take a news fast. Find a lover. Get an awesome sense of humour – loads for free on the internet if you need priming. Be unconventional, meet cool people, do new stuff. Be cheeky, be awesome! Be a thought leader, not a follower. Hey! Find God, if that is what it takes!

Siss the news!

Siss the conspiracies!

Siss depression and negativity!

Understanding Culture Helps Explain Why It Matters

André Malraux once wrote: “Culture is both the
heritage and the noblest possession of the world.”

Posted by Keith Tidman

What is culture? The answer is that culture is many things. ‘Culture is the sum of all forms of art, of love, and of thought’, as the French writer, André Malraux, defined the term. However, a little burrowing reveals that culture is even more than that. Culture expresses our way of life — from our heritage to our values and traditions. It defines us. It makes sense of the world. 

 

Culture measures the quality of life that society affords us, across sundry dimensions. It’s intended, through learning, experience, and discovery, to foster development and growth. Fundamentally, culture provides the means for members of a society to relate to and empathize with one another, and thereby to form a collective memory and, as importantly, to imagine a collective future to strive for.

 

Those ‘means’ promote an understanding of society’s rich assembly of norms and values: both shared and individual values, which provide the grist for our standards, beliefs, behaviours, and sense of belonging. Culture affords us a guide to socialisation. Culture is a living, anthropologic enterprise, meaning a story of human development and expression over the ages, which chronicles our mores, myths, stories, and narratives. And whatever culture chooses to value — intelligence, wisdom, creativity, relationships, valour, or other — gets rewarded.

 

Although ideas are at the core of culture, the most-visible and equally striking underpinning is physical constructs: cityscapes, statues, museums, monuments, places of worship, seats of government, boulevards, relics, artifacts, theatres, schools, archeological collections.

 

This durable, physical presence in our lives is every bit as key to self-identity, self-esteem, and representation of place as are the ideas-based standards we ascribe to everyday life. In the embodiment and vibrancy of those constructs we see us; in their design and purpose, they are mirrors on our humanity: a humanity that cuts across racial, ethnic, religious, social, and other demographic groups.

 

The culture that lives within us consists of the many core beliefs and customs that people hold close, remaining unchanged across generations. There’s a standard, values-based thread here that the group holds in high enough esteem to resist the corrosive effects of time. The result is a societal master plan for behavioural strategies. Such threads may be based in highly prized religious, historical, or moral traditions. 

 

Still other dogmas, however, don’t retain constancy; they become subject to critical reevaluation and negotiation, resulting in even deeply rooted ancestral practices being upended. Essentially, people contest and reassess what matters, especially as issues relate to values (abstract and concrete) and self-identity. The resulting changes in traditions and habits stem from discovery and learning, and take place either in sudden lurches or as part of a gentle progression. Either way, adaptation to this change is important to survival.

 

This inevitability and unpredictability of cultural change are underscored by the powerful influences of globalisation. Many factors combine to push global change: those that are economic, such as trade and business; those that are geopolitical, such as pacts and security and human rights; and those that accelerate change in technology, travel, and communications. These influences across porous national contours do not threaten cultural sameness per se, which is an occasional refrain, but do quicken the need for societies to adjust. 

As part of this global dynamic, culture’s instinct is to stabilise and routinise people’s lives, which reassures. Opinions, loyalties, apprehensions, ambitions, relationships, creeds, sense of self in time and place, and forms of idolatry become tested in the face of time, but they also comfort the mind. These amount to the collective social capital: the bedrock of what can rightly be called a community.

 

Language, too, is peculiarly adaptive to culture, a tool for varied expression: the reassuring yet unremarkable (everyday); the soaring and imaginative (creatively artistic); and the rigorously, demandingly precise (scientific and philosophic). In these regards, language is simultaneously adaptive to culture and adaptive of culture: a crucible on which the structure and usage of language remain pliant, to serve society’s bidding.

 

Accordingly, language is basic to framing our staple beliefs, values, and rituals — much of what matters to us, and helps to explain how culture enriches life. What we eat, what we wear, whom we marry, what music we listen to, what plays we attend, what locations we travel to, what we find humorous, what recreation we enjoy, what commemorations we observe — these and other ordinary lived experiences are the building blocks of cultural diversification.

 

Culture allows society to define its nature and ultimately prolong its wellbeing. Culture fills in the details of a larger shared reality about the world. We revere the multifaceted features of culture, all the while recognising that we must be prepared to reimagine and reform culture with the passage of time, as conditions shift. 

This evolutionary process brings vigour. To this extent, culture serves as the lifeblood of society.

 

Picture Post #64: A and Not-A

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

I took this photo in South Africa’s Suurveld. What does one see? A beetle, naturally. Should one say good things about it or bad? It is the Cape Mounted Rifles beetle. It is strikingly beautiful. At the same time, it is potentially lethal. A few of these in a horse’s fodder will kill the horse. Let us call the beetle ‘A’—and like anything in particular, there might be very different things we can say about it. We might indeed disagree —sometimes violently. This may be as far as the pre-analytical mind goes.

But according to the law of non-contradiction—the principle of contradiction—‘A is not not-A’.

There is something besides the beetle in the photo. How could one miss it? The beetle is perched on—in Xhosa—inkondlwane. In English, it is the Golden Everlasting. This grows in colonies, in Southern Africa. It is used to kindle fire. Diviners use it to induce trances. It sustains the beetle. And unusually, its seeds will not be planted. Call this ‘Not-A’. It is what one finds outside the existing frame. The question is now: whenever one talks about something, where is the ‘Not-A’? The answer may reveal volumes about who the person observing, the person speaking, is.

In terms of “Picture Posts”, though, I use this image to show how what we see depends so much on a network of other mental and social connections.

Is the Real Crime of Political Bloggers Making Fun of the Powerful?

The Trabant was the regular butt of jokes in East Germany.

 Foto: Z1021 Peter Endig/ dpa

Posted by Martin Cohen

Last week saw a commercial jet effectively hijacked and diverted to the capital of Belarus on the orders of its dictatorial leader, Alexander Lukashenko, the only person to ever serve as president of this sad country. Elections were held in 1994, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020. They might as well not have been.

Roman Protasevich, the blogger at the centre of the Belarus plane hijack, had provoked the fury of Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko. The Western media said it was for facilitating protests in the country, and in so doing to some extent endorsed the paranoid thinking of Lukashenko.  On the contrary, I suspect if all he had done was poke fun at the dictator, he would still have been a target. Because dictators have no sense of humour at all.

At the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberalization of Russia and Eastern Europe, it seemed that political jokes had become interesting, yet nowadays under not only Lukashenko but his puppet-master, Vladimir Putin, political jokes are once again gaining popularity. So let's take a quick look at the role of humour as the sole survivor of authoritarianism. 

If the Cold War officially ended a long time ago, in the world of jokes, stereotypes hang on and so many play on Putin’s KGB background, such as this one in which Stalin’s ghost appears to Putin in a dream. Of course, Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, ‘Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue.’ ‘Why blue?’ Putin asks. ‘Ha!’ says Stalin. ‘I knew you wouldn’t ask me about the first part.’ 

Another subversive barb, offers a man who is reported to have said: ‘Putin is a moron!’ and has been arrested by a Russian policeman. ‘No, sir, I meant not our respected leader, but another `Putin!’ he protests. ‘Don’t try to trick me’ snaps back the police man, ‘If you say ‘moron’, you are obviously referring to our President!’ Russians like jokes which play with the ‘referents’ of words, as philosophers might say. 

Another slightly more sophisticated version runs like this.

During the Second World War, a secretary is standing outside the Kremlin as Marshal Zhukov, the most important Russian general in World War Two, leaves a meeting with Stalin, and she hears him muttering under his breath, ‘Mustachioed idiot!’. She immediately rushes in to see Stalin and breathlessly reports, ‘I just heard Zhukov say ‘ Mustachioed idiot!’ Stalin dismisses the secretary and sends for Zhukov, who comes back in. ‘And just who did you have in mind with this talk of “Mustachioed idiots”!?’ asks Stalin. ‘Why, Adolf Hitler, of course!’ Satisfied, Stalin thanks him, dismisses him, calls the secretary back and explains what the Marshal had said. ‘And now, who did you think he was talking about?’

You have to laugh at this joke, with its deeply sinister undertones. And in addition there is an element of ‘just desserts’ in the informer-secretary’s predicament.

But back to ‘real life’ and when Vladimir Putin was elected President, in 2000, one of his first acts was to kill ‘Kukly,’ a sketch puppet show that portrayed him as Little Tsaches, a sinister baby who uses a ‘magic TV comb’ to bewitch a city - a humorous reworking of a German folktale in which a fairy casts a spell on an ugly dwarf so that others find him irresistibly beautiful.. Putin’s predecessor, Mr. Yeltsin, put up for years with the satirical barbs of the TV puppet, and even intervened when officials talked of prosecuting the makers of the show, NTV. But media management meant something rather different to Mr Yeltsin’s KGB-trained protégé. Putin simply threatened to shut down the channel unless it removed the puppet. NTV refused. Within months, it was under state control. According to Newsweek, ‘Putin jokes quickly vanished from Russia’s television screens.’’

The fact is, President Putin himself doesn’t ‘do’ jokes, at least not in the funny sense. He once remarked to a child, ‘Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere’—before adding, ‘That’s a joke.’

Perhaps President Putin would have allowed this joke though. It starts with the scene of two friends walking down a street. One asks the other ‘What do you think of the President?’ ‘I can’t tell you here,’ he replies. ‘Follow me.’ They disappear down a side street. ‘Now tell me what you think of the President,’ says the friend. ‘No, not here,’ says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. ‘OK here then.’ ‘No, not here. It’s not safe.’ They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. ‘OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president.’ ‘Well,’ says the other, looking around nervously, ‘actually I quite admire him.’

A New Theory of Language

by Thomas Scarborough

The way that we use language does not fit with the way that we theorise about it.  Linguistics professor Michael Losonsky writes, ‘Language as human activity and language as system remain distinct focal points despite various attempts to develop a unified view.’

I have been shaping a manuscript, in which linguistic observations play a major role.  Friends have encouraged me to describe a complete theory of language.  Naturally, it can only be done too briefly in 700 words. 

Language, as we know it, is assembled from a range of basic elements: morphemes, words, phrases, and so on.  These we arrange according to certain rules: semantic, syntactic, morphological and more.  Language, therefore, is seen as a constructive enterprise.  

Take a simple example, ‘This city is green.’  

‘This city’ is the subject.

‘is green’ is the predicate, which completes an idea about the subject.

‘This’ is a determiner—which identifies this particular city. 

‘is’ is the verb—which, among other things, points back to the subject.

We assemble these pieces, then, to produce a meaningful communication with another language user, or users.  This is the standard view.

I propose that language is quite the opposite.  Rather than beginning with basic elements, with which we assemble the ideas we communicate, language begins with the whole world.  The function of language then is to begin with this whole, and reduce it. 

Again, the simple example, ‘This city is green.’ 

‘City’ greatly reduces the whole, now encircling only cities.

‘This’ narrows these cities to one particular city.

‘green’ narrows it to just one aspect of one city.

‘is’ reduces the time window to the present.

In fact, we may note that we do much the same with the scientific method.  The scientific method minimises unwanted influences on independent variables.  It begins with the whole world, then screens things out until only independent variables are left, undisturbed by outside influences. 

A holistic view of language should have various consequences, if it is true.  There are certain things we would expect to ensue.  Here are just a few: 

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, even as we reduce it, our words will retain some involvement in the whole.  This, in fact, is the case.  In the words of the philosopher Max Black, our words 'trail clouds of implication'.  

• Since our language reduces the whole, we may expect to run into problems which one associates with partial views. Everything we put into words, because it is reduced, will overlook critical aspects of the world. The statistician George Box put it simply, ‘All models (which are reductions) are wrong, but some are useful.’

• Language originates in the whole, therefore no part of the whole can be focal. A holistic view of language will exclude origins or central ideas -- at least as a valid means of establishing truth.  We shall avoid all such schemes as, in the words of Jacques Derrida, 'return to an origin'.

• Since language is a reduction of the whole, the rules of language -- semantics, syntax, inflections, and so on -- will represent a tool by which we efficiently reduce the whole. Since there are various methods of reduction, we would expect that there would be various grammars. This, too, is the case. In the words of Max Black, ‘Grammar has no essence.'

• Since both ordinary language and science represent a reduction of the world, we would expect them both to work in the same way.  This should enable us to unite our ordinary language and science.  In fact, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin notes that, both in the common affairs of life and in our scientific pursuits, 'we use similar patterns of thought'. 

• The scientific method, being a reduction of the whole, would be tested not primarily by falsification within its own bounds, but by something I shall call ‘invalidation’ in the context of the whole.  The success of science (or otherwise) would be assessed within the context of the whole. 

• Different cultures have different physical and social worlds in their minds.  As they reduce this whole through language, it seems impossible that they could say anything partial which would contradict the whole.  Therefore even snippets of one's language will be a reflection of one's outlook on the world. 

On ‘Conceptual Art’: Where Ideas Eclipse Aesthetics

Fifteen Plaster Surrogates,

Allan McCollum

Posted by Keith Tidman

 

The influential French artist Marcel Duchamp once said, ‘I was interested in ideas — not merely in visual products’. As he put it, work ‘in the service of the mind’, not mere ‘retinal’ art intended to gratify visually. In this manner, conceptual art disrupted the art establishment’s long-held traditional expectation of artist as original creator of handmade objects: a painting, drawing, sculpture, or other. Normalised expectations about the roles of artist, art, observer, display venue, and society in conceptual art are defied; boundaries are both blurred and expandable.

 

To the point of ideas-centric artistic expression, the presence of agency and intentionality are all the more essential. The aim is to shift the artist’s focal point away from ‘making something from scratch’ to ‘manipulating the already-manufactured’. Hence the absence of the conceptual artist manipulating the raw materials that we might expect artists to conventionally use, like paint, stone, glass, clay, metal, fabric, wood, and so forth. 

Duchamp is regarded as the pioneer and inspiration of conceptual art, whose early-twentieth-century foray in the field included a signed urinal, titled ‘Fountain’. It was a classic example of the avant-garde nature of this art form. Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, as they got to be called, became a fixture of conceptual art, up to the present day: where artists select, modify, and position ordinary, everyday manufactured objects as thought-provoking artistic expression. An art of the intellect, where objects are ancillary to concepts.

The heart of ‘conceptual art’ is ideas, inquiry, and intellectual deliberation rather than traditional beauty or aesthetic gratification. The objective is to urge observers to reflect cerebrally on the experience. Conceptual art can thus be seen as sharing a bond with other fields, like philosophy and the social sciences. But what does all that mean in practice? 

The central aspiration to spur observers to reflect upon ideas — not to engage exclusively in the ‘retinal’ experience mentioned above — necessitates such agency. The overriding objective of the conceptual artist’s intention is to focus on ‘meaning’ (something with high information content) rather than on the illustration of a scene that’s directed more traditionally toward triggering the senses (something with high experiential content). Art where, as Aristotle once put it, the ‘inward significance of things’ governs.

 

The meaning that the observer takes away from interaction with the art may be solely the observer’s own, or the artist’s, or the professional art critic’s, or the museum’s, or a hybrid of those, depending on how motivated the observer is. Either way, the art and the ideas conjured by it are linked. Conceptual art thereby sees its commission as philosophical, not just another commodity. Notable to this point, all artworks, including conceptual artworks, are created within a social and cultural context. This context exerts influence in defining and nourishing whatever philosophical theories the artwork is intended to convey.

 

What conceptual art underscores, then, is that no single core definition of all art applies to it. Even within any one category or movement of art, attempts to define it authoritatively can prove thorny: Examples of artwork, and the artists’ intent, may be quite dissimilar. Definitions, beyond generalizations, may be fuzzy at best; opinions about what does or doesn’t fit within the category may prove fractious. Conceptual art only magnifies these realities about attempts to craft a universal definition. 

 

A distinguishing factor is that this kind of art rests not only in its provocative appeal to the intellect, but sometimes even more directly to issues that strike at the heart of social and political displeasure. Or perhaps a little less adversarial, the artist’s unapologetic desire to disruptively probe cultural values and norms. Yet, that’s not to say other visual art movements, including those whose primary tradition is aesthetics, don’t have cognitive, socio-political, or cultural appeal too, for some clearly do. 

 

Indeed, one reward we seek from the experience of art broadly is not only to derive aesthetic joy (a matter of taste), but also to incite thought and to better understand the world and ourselves (a matter of judgment and rationalism). There is philosophical history to this view: Immanuel Kant, for example, also differentiated between aesthetic and logical judgment. To aim for the resulting understanding, the interpretation of conceptual artwork may result in sundry appropriate explanations of the art, or a single best explanation with others ranked in order behind it.

 

One thing in particular that we might praise about conceptual art is its unorthodox interpretation of, and verdict on, societal, cultural norms — quite often, rebelling against our philosophical keystones. In this way, conceptual art’s zealous pioneering temperament forces us to rethink the world we have constructed for ourselves.

 

If enlightenment arises from those second-guesses, then conceptual art has met its objective. And if, beyond illumination, action arises to yield social or cultural change, then that is all the better – in the eye of the conceptual artist.

 

Super League Self Defeat

Posted by Allister Marran

Picture credit: Dan Leydon, The Beautiful Game.

The current Super League debacle is simply a good example of how modern capitalism destroys humanity and innovation in exchange for pure greed.

There is an investor in Japan who owns one share of Nintendo stocks, and every year he goes to the shareholder meeting and asks the dumbest of questions, always relating to something like, "Why don't Nintendo start making and selling X?” (replace X with dog food, or electric cars, or anything that is selling well) which will make the company more profits.

The Japanese, as courteous and likeable fellows that they are, always answer the same way, "We are a games company at heart. We make games that make people happy. It's about the fans, not the shareholders."

Many games and technology companies have come and gone, because they followed the Western model of profits and return on investment over customer experience. Atari, Sega, Intellevision, Colecovision, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Amstrad, the list is endless.

A small business owner exists to service the needs of a customer base. He puts his name and face to a product, and his personal integrity attracts new clients. 

A large listed corporate company insulates its investors from any liability, responsibility, personal association or any other kind of accountability. As a result, many people don't even know what companies they invested in when they modified their share portfolio. For all they know, they could have shares in a company that dumps nuclear waste into the water of an orphanage for needy children. They don't need to know or care, as long as they make money.

Manchester United were the richest sports club in the world until a takeover by the Americans a few years ago. Those investors did not use much of their own money, but took out loans and investment money and leveraged it back to the team. 

Overnight the club went from kings to paupers, owing hundreds of millions to banks and struggling to make loan and interest repayments, whilst disbursing any profits in the form of dividends and cash payouts to the shareholders who invested little in the first place.

Football is the game of the people. It is owned by the people. FIFA represents their interests, as small, poor local clubs vote for committees that vote for regional representatives that vote for national representatives who sit on the body of FIFA. They have their own issues, but they represent the small boy without shoes in a small township in Brazil who owns an old ball and a dream of playing for his country and winning a world cup.

The Super League is the very worst of corporate greed, return on investment and unaccountable capitalism ruining another important business sector. It removes the fans from the game, and funnels profits from FIFA who are supporting grass roots efforts to find the next Pele or Messi or Bale or Mane, and redirects them to the disinterested ultra rich in the USA or Dubai or the Far East. People who don't care about soccer, who don't watch the game on Saturday or Sunday, who don't buy the merchandise, or know the words to the team song.

It could be argued that Nintendo, the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company, are still around because they continue to tell that one shareholder that the fans are more important than the profits. It's a bad strategy for annual ROI and dividends, but clearly great for long term sustainability and output. It allows them to plan for the bad times, when game machines start their cycle of decline before new technology renews it. 

I hope the fans of the English Big Six are ready to demand the same of their fat cat owners. 

Atari, Mattel, Intellevision, Commodore, IBM and many others were the big players in the games industry in the 80s, and for all intents and purposes they are gone today. Nobody believed they could fail, but they did not listen to the demands of the market and fell to smaller, nimbler, more attuned competition.

There is a chance that the same will happen to the Liverpools, Manchester Uniteds, and Chelseas of the world. No company is too big to fail. It is a lesson history has taught us over and over again. The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich put it radically: “The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.” But ruthlessness eats its own.

“You Will Never Walk Alone" are the words any Liverpool fan lives by. But trust is a two way street. Football is more than a business. Let us hope we are not left deserted on the roadside on our journey.  

Picture Post #63: The Audience

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be 

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

Girl Dancing In Front Of Her Teddy Bear. Paris, 1961

I like this image. Obviously, it's gentle, charming, and fun too. But beyond that, there is a touch of magic, in that the little girl is dancing, yes, but the bear is watching and waving. The bear becomes the active element in the composition, the girl a mere puppet, seemingly held up by invisible strings.

Not that it matters, I think it is a still from the film Gigot, that was set in Paris, so that's where this dance takes place and it was directed by Gene Kelly. However, the little girl – Nicole, in the film – is played by Diane Gardner. I believe this was her starring role!

The Problem of Inauthenticity

Harry, Meghan and Oprah having a chat (Photocredit-HarpoProductions-JoePugliese)

What was the ‘intention’ of  Mister and Missus Harry Mountbatten–Windsor with THAT  interview? You know, the one with Oprah Winfrey in which they spilled the beans on life in the British Royal Family.

As one gushing website put it:

“The dust is still settling from Oprah Winfrey’s explosive two-hour interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on Sunday, and the revelations are devastating. Markle, pregnant with the couple’s second child, described the racist treatment she endured from social media, the British press and the royal family itself.”

Was the intention then to lift the lid on racism in the Royal Family? Certainly it seemed so when Harry revealed about their baby: 

“There were ‘concerns and conversations’ about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”

The British Royals are a venerable institution, and the Queen’s husband in particular, aka Harry’s grandfather, had a well-grounded reputation for off-colour remarks, including references to “slitty eyes” while visiting China and saying of a messy fuse box in a factory that it looked like it had been put together “by an Indian”.

Was the intention of the interview then to give Harry’s grandad (who would die only a few weeks later) a really bad day? Apparently not, although, of course, neither Meghan nor Harry would actually stoop to naming names. However, Oprah herself did clarify on CBS the next morning that Harry wanted it be known that “it was not his grandmother, nor his grandfather that were part of those conversations.”

Looking at the allegation and subsequent clumsy refinement, it looks to me like the intention was not so much to throw mud at the Royal Family, which after all, for Harry would be rather like throwing mud at yourself, as at some particular individual within it with whom there had been a disagreement. Also called settling scores in public. Is that, however, a worthwhile thing to be doing on Oprah’s highly moral show? I ask because Ms Winfrey has publicly set a very high standard for her interviews. Ever since the occasion in 1988, when she interviewed white supremacists in order to “gain insight into the source of their hatred”. 

To be honest, so venomous was the interview with Harry and Meghan, Oprah could almost have offered a similar motivation here. Alas though, truth is more prosaic, and it seems only that the two wealthy celebrities were being interviewed by the third wealthy celebrity merely as a way to promote themselves. Is self-promotion a worthy, moral endeavour? I suppose we should be careful not to be too puritanical about such things. After all, a celebrity is someone who gives the public some kind of pleasure. But there's a point where celebrities celebrating themselves, and attacking lesser figures, becomes rather dodgy. 

After Winfrey interviewed the racists on that long-ago show, she publicly regretted it and vowed that from then on the watchword would be “intention”. What’s that all about then? Well, the term, signifying the search for spiritual values, is central to the new age philosophy of Gary Zukav set out in his book, The Seat of the Soul. In the book, Zukav, who was already famous for his new-age investigations of personal psychology and quantum physics (including one of my own favourite reads, The Dancing Wu Li Masters), offers a grand cosmological theory: 

“Each soul enters into a sacred agreement with the Universe to accomplish specific goals, or take on a particular task. All of your experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it.” 

For individuals this means one thing. Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and “that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.”

This is part of a broader theory set out in the book that humanity is evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues spiritual values. Zukav argues (rather predictably) that the pursuit of external power generates conflict—between individuals and lovers, within communities, and between nations – while “authentic power” infuses the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust. 

“Reach for your soul. Reach even further, the impulse of creation and power authentic, the hourglass point between energy and matter, that is the seat of the soul.” 

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at MIT, praised the book as “remarkable” and complimented Zukav, calling him “one of our finest interpreters of frontier science”, able to explain and understand the human spirit.  

Anyway, the principle became a guiding light for Winfrey. “The number one principle that rules my life is intention,” Winfrey has said adding that  after reading Zukav’s book, she called a meeting with the TV show’s producers and announced a new strategy: “We are going to be a force for good, and that is going to be our intention.” 

Winfrey has also revealed that there had been plenty of times where she’d heard ideas for the show that had no positive intention, and so from now on she would turn these down. Nor, she said, would she accept ideas where she felt people were manufacturing an intention that they themselves didn’t believe in. She’d no longer accept this sort of inauthenticity.

But looking at the sight of a wealthy princeling, who once dressed up as a Nazi at a rave, and a model who in her brief visit to England was accused of bullying and humiliating staff, using her show as a vehicle to cast aspersions against friends and family alike, I can’t help but feel that either Zukav’s philosophy is worthless, or Winfrey’s adoption of it is, well, inauthentic. Or maybe both, of course!