The Believer, causality

I only subscribe to one magazine, The Believer. The cost is modest, and there’s usually at least a few worthwhile bits in each issue, although the whole thing kind of stinks of the mainstream intelligensia habitus that I found so distasteful in academia. Nevertheless, I myself am entrained in a large part to that habitus, so there’s enough there for me. Anyway, I’m backed up about a year. If you ask why, here’s is what I am reading currently:

Tom Rockmore - Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Steve Aylett - Only an Alligator

William Cronon, ed. - Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature

Simone de Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity

Jeffrey St. Clair - Been Brown So Long It Looked Green to Me

Immanuel Wallerstein - World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction

So, I get through these…quite…slowly. I sat down though to check out the April 2007 issue a few minutes ago though and immediately felt the need to write something, to write about something that’s been bothering me a lot lately. I was reading the first article, Jonathan Taylor’s “Admiration Journey”, ostensibly about going to Thomas Bernhard’s house in Austria to, I don’t know, connect with the writer, or in my mind - I didn’t get past the first page of the article because I wanted to go write this, and what I have to say isn’t really in relation of Taylor’s article anyway, so I don’t feel bad about bolting off without hearing the guy through (I have no idea if his point will coincide, conflict or have nothing to do with mine) - or in my mind, somehow see the material existence of the writer and try to find some explanation for Bernhard’s writings in it.

The Believer featured an article a while back about visiting writers’ houses, how they’ve turned into museums and things like that and what people expect to gain, etc. I don’t remember the point of the article, and I have too much stuff to do to go back and re-read it just to note it in a blog, but my memory wants me to believe that it was somewhat antithetical to the whole idea. Let me try something else though, but keep in mind: writer’s houses, writer’s things, viz., material existence.

A few months ago, I finished one of the Penguin collections of Lovecraft’s stories:

A thoroughly footnoted-to- death volume in which every facet of every story is somehow connected with Lovecraft’s life. If a restaurant is mentioned, a Lovecraft scholar figures out where Lovecraft was eating when he was writing that story and then tracks down the menu and figures out the likely meal that ol’ H.P. ate that gave birth to the idea for Yuggoths or Sluggoths or Digdug or whatever. Because writers and artists never just make anything up. There is always something in reality that is causally related to everything an artist creates.

Let’s put aside for a moment the kinds of shitty biopics like Pollock which show the actual causal connections between, I don’t know, accidentally knocking a paint can over with dripping paint on a canvas. Rather I want to concentrate on the idea that seems to be pervasive, not only that our thoughts or the ideas we invent are causally and linearly connected to material existence (not that there isn’t a connection), but that you can draw a narrative out of it that you can connect event A with thought B, not necessarily in a nomothetic way, but at least within a plausible explanatory framework.

I had my critical thinking students watch Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and when it was over, I asked, “Why did Frank masturbate and wipe his semen all over the place at school?” The answers were all good, but all causal: his parent’s divorce, he has an Oedipal complex, the kid’s a freak, etc., i.e., there is some event or some thing we can point to that counterfactually, if it hadn’t have occurred, would not have caused Frank’s abnormal behavior.

Perhaps there is something to the counterfactual, but in a different way than the causal picture paints. I would contend that yes, indeed, we can locate the divorce in a background of concerns that, if they never occurred, Frank wouldn’t have behaved in such a way (maybe…that’s the problem with counterfactuals, they’re ‘what if’ games, and in dynamic evolutionary systems, you can’t wind back the clock and expect to get the same behavior). But it’s not the divorce that caused him to masturbate in public (think of the ridiculousness of that statement), but rather that the divorce tore asunder a system of relations, throwing that system (his family) into a period of crisis, a period directed by a chaotic attractor, whereby the members of the system had no clear entrainments to follow and thereby flitted about with no clear goal in mind.

In other words, Frank’s behavior is an emergent property, or if emergence isn’t to your taste, it was a new property of the system guided by these new relations (the divorce breaking apart the former ones and creating this new one: joint custody), and the older system isn’t causally related to the new one, but is simply a prior state of the new one which is sublated (aufheben) within the new configuration. That is, the new configuration is a transformed version of the old one, where parts of the system are preserved and parts are negated, and if I really wanted to get Hegelian (even though I only barely understand the process), I could try to explain the contradictions of the family prior to the divorce, etc.

Ok, let me get back to the beginning. The picture we have of artists is almost universally a causal one. Things happen in the artist’s life and the artists uses them as fodder for her fiction or painting or etc. And thus realism is our paradigm. I won’t get into the folly of realism as somehow giving an objective view of whatever (There’s actually quite a good article in The Believer by Chris Bachelder entitled “Doctorow’s Brain” on the subject [Feb 07]), but there’s a correspondence theory of fiction going on here, a one-to-one correspondence between the events in an artist’s life and her art.

I want to contend though that even when a person plunders her life in order to create, this isn’t an easy causal connection, but rather a way of linearizing the process afterwards in order to tell a story about the creation of the work. In fact, when we try to reduce a piece of fiction or any artwork to the material existence of the artist - to think her house or his writing desk will explain the artwork or the process of creating - we’re playing in to the Enlightenment explanatory framework of atomism and additivity. Break the system down into its constituent parts, explain each part, and rebuild the system. Presto: there’s why Gravity’s Rainbow exists because Thomas Pynchon, I don’t know, whatever, likes eating prunes. But dynamic systems are non-additive. You can’t just put the members of the family above together and: there you go. What makes the family, The Berkmans, are the relationships between the characters, both exogenous and endogenous to the family unit, and the transformations of that system.

Creativity is not a causal relationship, but an emergent one of a certain system. You can’t learn about an artist’s life and expect to get clues about how such-and-such an event led directly to the creation of an artwork. You can try to re-build her life into a just-so story if you need to, and certainly, a person’s life isn’t immaterial to the subject at hand, but that life in isolation of anything else is just going to lead you astray, and even located within a dense network of interconnections can’t give you a perfect story.

The question then is to try and figure out properties of systems that seem to foster interesting creative works, not, again, in a manner that is supposed to draw out a lawlike regularity, but rather that may give one more insight into some probabilities for certain systems (so, of course, the boundary conditions have to be rather explicit).

Filed by andyb at March 7th, 2008 under philosophy