Making Strange

Garden Fish. © 2000. Oil on panel. 33" x 27" 

The Russian Formalists of the early 20th century proposed a theory of "making strange." By offering the viewer something that does not readily simulate or evoke or call to mind natural images or other referents, poems (and, by extension, other literature and paintings) seem strange and, at first, meaningless. The theorists (among them, Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eichenbaum, and others) developed the concept of otstranenie ("making strange") in literature, and they asserted that poetry pushed forward unusual imagery and such devices as rhythm, meter, and rhyme—which were not commonly evident in ordinary speech—in order to wrench their subjects from their habituated invisibility or routineness in everyday experience and, by "making strange," bring them to the awareness of the listener or reader.

Every mental association can be untied from its original context and connected to another context--that is, given a new "meaning." Empirical science is premised on the notion that natural objects follow regular "laws" or behaviors, which can be reproduced with a specified degree of exactness and certitude. Words, of course, are far more profligate and randy and move around among many "meanings" with almost no qualms or hesitancy. Words and images, principally, and a few facial and bodily gestures, are mapped onto experience in a way that reflects the "meanings" that others agree upon.

The fashion of things, from clothing to cars to colloquialisms, follows a trajectory from the arrival of the noticeably different form, to the widely accepted and admired use, and thence to the noticeably passé state. The actual form did not change, just our awareness of it, first as new, unusual, and sanctioned. Then its formal aspects—what it looked like or sounded like—became ubiquitous and popularly repeated. But in a few short weeks or months, another style for the same situation arose and displaced the current fashion, which soon slipped into the "old" or "out" look, and once again became easily discernible as style. Movies are very good examples of this phenomenon. It is quite easy to look back at an old movie, say, from the 50s or 70s and immediately recognize the cinematic styles and tropes (i.e., not merely the cars and clothing and hair styles), which in their time were adopted (usually) as a means of camouflaging the artifice of the moviemaking in order to enhance a sense of verisimilitude or realism, which prevailed for a while until the techniques themselves became formulaic to the point of rigidity, at which point they were replaced by newer manners of portrayal.

Triple Self Portrait — Here I am painting, with two self-portraits in the paintings on the wall behind me. Click on this image to see a larger version.

Art Moralizes Nature — Nature Demoralizes Art

Beauty is a property of things perceived by humans, who can judge and evaluate abstractly. And since beauty is considered to be a culmination or perfection of specific qualities or characteristics, there is also ugly, the deficiency of those qualities. But these qualities are socially valued. Remember: there are no ugly things "in Nature."

Artworks embody, make concrete in one way or another, these qualities of beauty and thus isolate them, as it were, from the demands of utility, so that beauty, grace, radiance, quiddity even, can be contemplated. That's what Aristotle means by  catharsis and vicarious violence.

Because artworks do not need to be denotatively truthful—because works of art are fictions, because they do not have to have a utilitarian purpose, because they are free creations—the maker can concentrate on the accidental qualities of appearances in order to manipulate the degree to which beauty or formal wholeness or another property can exhibit itself.

Art moralizes nature. The artist takes the visible qualities of things as his model and forms and arranges them in the work of art in such a way to produce an order to these qualities. Canons and rules and guidelines and other prescriptions are the socializing of the raw, unordered, un-beauty and un-ugly of nature, the making of preferences for and against ways of perceiving these qualities. Art is a social endeavor, and by being social, it subjects its materials (the stuff of Nature) to the mores of the group, of the society. Art moralizes nature, imposing preferences on colors and shapes and forms that, in the wild, occur for other reasons and purposes.

And Nature, which precedes art, is indifferent to these moral rules of Art. From time to time, Nature rebuffs art, Nature supersedes art, Nature is superabundantly more than art, defeating the rules of art: There are no binding canons of portrayal in Nature. Ultimately, Nature demoralizes art—i.e., Nature de-moralizes art.

Art moralizes Nature. Nature demoralizes Art.

English, the Great Multicultural Endeavor

Year in and year out, like the appearance of insects in the spring, someone circulates a clever email message lamenting the confusing complexity of English spelling. A long time ago, some wag concocted the word "photi," that is, "fish," which was composed of the /f/ sound of "ph" in "photograph," the /i/ sound of "o" in "women," and the /sh/ sound of "ti" in any "tion" word.  

>sigh<

How wrong-headed that complaint is.

The English language is the world's greatest multicultural project. Any word can come from anywhere else and stay at any of five main English residences: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections. (For structural reasons, the smaller English enclaves of pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions are highly restricted—nobody's been in or out in a long looooong time.)

If you're a foreign word, you are free to come in—no immigration controls, no quotas, no visa restrictions. There are only a few rules: If you dress in a non-Latin alphabet, you'll have to change into Latin clothes; if you walk across the page from right to left, well, you'll have to do it the other way 'round; if you like to make odd sounds that aren't among the 45 or so English phonemes, then the natives will find some for you that sound almost the same.

English will also let you keep the letters that make you what you are (i.e., foreign) in your own original order—that's right, you can keep your own spelling! At first, you'll be walking stooped over, in what is called the "italic" mode. But after a while, that'll wear off and you can walk upright. Eventually you'll even forget to wear all those strange diacritical marks, too. Think of that: You can keep your foreign appearance because ultimately, English speakers aren't really worried about the wildly inconsistent spelling in English, which is caused mostly because foreign words aren't forced to change to follow basic English practices.

But foreign words do have to agree to accept a few things, mainly English plurals (that applies to you, nouns and verbs), possessives, and English syntax and grammar. (English sometimes allows a bit of leeway on that, like the French habit of putting the adjective after the noun. It's not like English imposes a date certain by which a foreign word has to follow all the rules, you know.)

So whenever you feel the onrush of a public outcry to bemoan that whacky English spelling, just remember that English is the greatest multicultural experiment around.

Consider the Preposition

This subject first arose in an on-line email list discussion about art and aesthetics, specifically on the point of how concepts are predicated. Another person argued that the common practice in English of saying "X is Y" ran afoul of many difficulties (instantiation, reification, etc.). 

These conversations led me to ponder how we develop our sense of predicating qualities on some named subject, and that led me further to think of how we use English idiomatically, almost without noticing it, to create shades of distinction in our expressions. Ultimately, I began to think about prepositions and their near relatives, the adverbs that are used with verbs ("run down a fact," "speed up the process," etc.) which has long lost its literal meaning (down, up) and now conveys only a conventionalized meaning.

Language historians tell us that our modern prepositions evolved from these adverbs used in this way. [Paul Roberts, Understanding Grammar, New York: Harper & Row, 1954, pp. 227-228.]

But there is still the matter of how we come to know what "up" and "down," "over" and "under" and the other prepositions (adverbs) signify. As a small child learning the language, our mother or father might have put a toy ___ the table and said, "The toy is on the table." Next, they might have moved it ___ the table and said, "The toy is under the table." And this would have gone on and on until we grasped the relationship they were demonstrating. 

How did we get from "on the table"—a position—to "this goes on and on"?

On this blog, I want to consider the preposition, and to consider how we think about representations, on one hand verbal and internal, and on the other, external and often visual.

I will come back to this specific topic in a separate, longer blog. I will also include here essays and musings about visual art, language, and other matters that arise from culture and society.