John: I meant that ballet cannot transmit concepts, any more than football can, since only language can transmit concepts, and ballet and football do not use language. Hence, while it would be possible to teach a chimpanzee to dance or play football, one could not teach it concepts and would be justified (I think) in calling it mindless by comparison with human beings. Sorry I did not make that clear.
Me: The 'mindless' point was intriguing because it implied a particular view of art which I don't think I share. In your chimpanzee example - you could, I suppose, teach a chimp to play football or dance after a fashion but the point is it could not play football as well as Elano ( I am a Man City supporter) or dance as well as Nureyev and that's the point. They play or dance that well because of the presence of mind - not just their own but also the minds of others who create the context. It may not be mind in the sense of high cerebral intelligence but it is mind nonetheless. The further point is that all art is a conceptualised version of something or other. In this sense, dance is a series of concepts as much as any poem or novel.
John: I dare say that the 'mindless' thing comes down, like to many other disputes, to the meaning of words. I'm sure you are right that professional footballers and ballet dancers play football and dance better than chimps (in the opinion of football and ballet fans, if not of chimps). But no matter how well they played or danced they could not transmit concepts. Words can. Take, for example, your email to me. It is made of concepts linked together into an argument and is therefore undoubtedly an expression of mind. You could not have transmitted the same concepts by dancing or running after a ball. That is why, although I might say I disagree with your email, it would be absurd to say that I disagree with a ballet or a football match. They do not contain any concepts to disagree with. Or so it seems to me - but I'm well aware that all such opinions are subjective - which was, indeed, the main point of the book I wrote about the arts.
Me: I think you are setting too much store by agree/disagree. Art expresses concepts by other means. It may not do so as clearly as the verbal statement of those concepts, but that is not its intention. Poetry, on the whole, does not present a series of concepts with which one could agree or disagree. I don't see why, therefore, it's any different from ballet or music.
To be, I am sure, continued.
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
If Carey is right then you could argue that no art form can convey concepts except novels. If paintings can convey concepts, then so can ballet.
ReplyDeleteMind you, ballet is the most boring and ridiculous of all art forms (except for its prose cousin, mime.) And football really can't covey concepts - we can call Zidane an artist, but that's just pretension.
Sometimes forms like dance can inspire the viewer to conceptual thought, but it's hard to say whether those concepts inhere in the original art. But this is true of poetry also - it's more a matter of degree than an absolute, that word-based forms are more convincingly said to embody concepts than a form such as dance. i gave up theorising about art, and what is or isn't art, a while ago, as all my thoughts seemed to end in paradox (though that may say more about me than it does about art).
ReplyDeletei trust some of the deleted chat consisted of pistol-whipping threats? i didn't like his 'Intellectuals & the Masses' book, well i did but i thought it was bullshit and at times i wondered if he'd even read the writers he was attacking. Still, better enjoyable bullshit than tedious bullshit, i say.
I understand perfectly what John Carey is saying and I think you do, too, Bryan. Words are sequential, but experience is not. He even said as much in the original riff on ballet about arms and legs. They are all moving at once, but words can only describe them sequentially: This happened, then this, then this.
ReplyDeleteWords fail when it comes to describing other than literature and they even fail sometimes in that regard. J. Joyce wrote stream-of-consciousness novels in an attempt to at least make things *seem* to be happening simultaneously, but even he could not overcome the consecutive nature of the medium.
Also, when athletes, dancers, and musicians are deeply involved in their art, they are indeed "mindless" -- in the sense that they're not thinking in words; they're focused in a bodily sense. Though I am just a Sunday sketcher, when I draw I don't think in words. It's one of the few times I can avoid them and I cherish the activity for that. And sometimes it feels as if my hands remember, not my mind, how to do this or that with a pencil.
Nige? Whither art thou, fellow fine art lover?
My concern is that you don't use justified formatting on the text, Bryan.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of an old cartoon in the New Yorker magazine. An office worker is before his boss (who is seated at his desk) with arms outstretched, head bowed and tilted to the left while he's standing on one leg, the other curled up behind it.
ReplyDeleteThe boss says to him: "Just tell me what's on your mind, Ferguson. The language of dance has always eluded me."
Might not the problem be in the presumption that mind deals only in words and concepts? It also deals in imagery, which can be designated by words but is not identical with the words used to designate it. Also, when one is doing something physically, such as dancing or playing football, one's mind is clearly at work, though not in the same way as it is when you are writing. One's mind allows one to be aware, but one can be aware wordlessly and not necessarily with conceptualization.
ReplyDeleteCan football transmit concepts? I believe it can. The fashioning of victory is a concept, and it starts with a manager's design: "I have studied this opposition; do I play with a formation of 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 or 4-5-1? Which formation will best nullify their strengths, expose their weaknesses, play to our strengths, protect against our weaknesses? Who should I play from my squad? What instructions do I give to individual players? My concept, therefore, is this....and now I must transmit the concept to the players"
ReplyDeleteThe players, working within the framework of the concept, understand the broad scope and limitations of their roles, and how they must attempt to achieve victory through individual skill and intelligence, but with an awareness of the needs of the team, and throughout the game the crowd will be able to identify the broad concept.
Let us take Elano, a player mentioned elsewhere. On receiving the ball, he has to quickly size up his options. It is, as Bryan describes, 'a presence of mind': "Is there enough space to run past three defenders before passing or shooting, or should I attempt with a single pass to dissect four defenders deployed between me and my team-mate, but I know my winger is carrying a slight injury, will he have the pace to collect the pass, or, alternatively, is the goalkeeper far enough off his line to allow me to chip the ball over him and into an empty net? These are some of the thought processes. Now he has to employ his skills in executing the chosen option. If he hits the ball too heavily it may run out of play, if he under-hits it, it may be intercepted, if he shapes his body in too obvious a way, it gives early warning to the opposition of his intentions. This is footballing intelligence allied to high skill in realising the concept of a 'flatfooted defence left floundering' (sounds like a landscape by Constable). It is a concept communicated to others (substantially) without words.
In achieving the manager's concept of a planned or fashioned victory, the players have, it can be argued, displayed greater artistic expression than the actor who has delivered, under direction, the vision of a writer, but we don't hesitate to call the actor an artist, and is that because he works with words, and somebody else's words at that?
I wanna hear the small talk!
ReplyDeleteCarey's analogy between football and ballet seems to be something of a red herring because ballet is an attempt to communicate something, whereas football is a competition.
ReplyDeleteAs other contributors have pointed out, Carey's argument is a bizarre denial that anything other than language can be the bearer of meaning. Not only are images and music capable of transmitting concepts, but if language can transmit concepts, then anything capable of representing language must itself be capable of transmitting concepts.
John Carey makes a good point when he says, "I'm sure you are right that professional footballers and ballet dancers play football and dance better than chimps (in the opinion of football and ballet fans, if not of chimps)." Lot's of the behavior we have learned is non-verbal communication. In fact, not behaving following an event can communicate something as well. We humans have enough problems figuring out what other people mean, and this includes when plainspeaking.
ReplyDeleteBut, let's take up the dancer, the poet, and the athlete. If they are to communicate through their respective arts, they need to be good at it. I will stop short of saying that the best artists communicate the most, because it may better be considered that the best provoke both concepts and yet more art. Thus, the ekphrasic.
The best are also provoking worth to life, something more than mere "animalistic" existence. If we did not have these artists, we would not as often raise ourselves above what we picture the life of chimps must be--and here I consciously use stereotypical chimpdom as a prop for my argument. If I watch Nureyev dance, read Billy Collins' poetry, or watch Marvelous Marvin Hagler box, I am filled with concepts that life is greater than dog-eat-dog (poor dog).
Some of these thoughts are expressed or emhanced in a recent blog post here: Alley War Poetry. There it is pointed out, for instance, that the athlete creates his art and story using him- or herself as the main character, and the better the athlete, the more that inspired and inspirational story can come out--poetry in vivo, high communication using the body.
Yours,
Rus
Gordon, are you conflating meaning and concept - one concete information, the other abstraction. A bee's dance conveys information but I doubt if it's capable of anything higher.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point Rus: i think one of the benefits of art etc. is - apart from its ostensible message - being in the presence of high skill, of passion & ordered experience. One has some sense, perhaps, that life can be more than some exclusively-biological struggle for food & reproduction; art is what is excess to requirement.
ReplyDeleteYou're right David, it's correct to distinguish meaning from concept. I take meaning to be a combination of sense and reference, and, if we take concept to be synonymous with sense, then a form of art could communicate sense without communicating reference.
ReplyDeleteI still can't get over the outrageousness of comparing a sport to an artistic medium. It doesn't make any sense. They have such different goals and such totally distinct roles in society. This is an argument that should never have begun.
ReplyDeleteRyan,
ReplyDeleteYou wouldn't be holding onto a narrow view of art, would you? Where should our ideas of inclusion stop? At ice dancing maybe?
Yours,
Rus