Entropy, Publishing, and the Author

The publishing process is a wonderful microcosm and exemplar of the principle of entropy. The constant question is where in the system—in the workflow—to put the energy to maintain the order of the system.

At the initiation of a publication, the "content" is in a very weak state of order. The different topics and subtopics in the raw manuscript are often not well related, not sequential (if sequence is an important quality), not all of the external facts are present or verified, and the language and syntax are not in their final states. When the publication is finally produced, everything has been ordered: the facts and phraseology have been checked and refined, the content has been reduced to some definitive visual form (typeface and pictures, e.g.), and all has been produced in physical form.

Somewhere between beginning and end, large quanta of order have been infused into the disordered, chaotic entity called the publication. Unless there is a high degree of redundant work ("digging a hole and filling it up again"), if there is an efficient production flow in which all undecideds are decided and all errors are rectified, then the amount of energy put into the ordering the material should be about the same.

The big issue is where to put the energy into the system: Should you give the knowledge-rich but computer-unsavvy workers a high-end editing or production tool—InCopy—which adds energy demand on them (and probably adds more to you later, when you clean up their errors)? Should you give them RTF files, which preserve a lot of the text styling and reduce their energy output, but which requires you to add your own energy-work to clean up and reflow their revisions? Should you let them just correct the text by hand on a paper proof (which concentrates their energy only to the content, but it's a low total energy output) and then type all of it in by youself (high engergy *and* slow procedure)? Or should you hire a typist or other text inputter to do that work for you so you can overlap with the layout?

I have always emphasized that in a workflow with several clearly-defined areas and groups of workers, do not shift burdens unnecessarily. Let the authors write the text (and, in this case, *write* the revisions or corrections); let the editors handle the manuscript preparation, from language and usage to production markup (which would include specialists, such as word-processor-typists entering written corrections); let the graphics and production staff handle the tasks of the design and layout of the publication. This minimizes redundant work—extra energy—which in not needed to maintain the total order of the final product.

Just What Is It That Makes Artworks So ... Artful?

Let's look at it from a different vantage point, i.e., not whether the artist intended it to be aesthetic-evoking, or even whether the perceiver suffered an aesthetic experience. Rather, let's look at what kind of things (objects, acts, etc.) can provoke an "aesthetic experience" and if these a.e.'s are categorically alike or at least very similar.

What kinds of "aesthetic" can be attributed to the feelings provoked by (a) a well-thrown and caught pass; (b) a painting; (c) a tasty cake; (d) a dog; (e) the proverbial sunset.

I believe they are all different in their kind, and the painting (b) stands out because it is not contingent, it is a free experience.

(a) The particularly remarkable sporting feat can only have one response (for each viewer, for each viewing) on a single continuum from very bad to very good, and the quality of the feat (and thus the cause of the "aesthetic" part of the experience) is foreordained by the history and rules of the game.

(c) The tastiness, and thus the basis for the "aesthetic" experience of the cake, is grounded in the physical appetite of eating, conditioned by the eater's experiences and food and flavor preferences, and is again limited to a scope of responses from nauseating to addictive, or some such range. Again, it's a contingent experience, and it's restricted by culinary history and cultural rules.

(d) One's "aesthetic" feeling for a domestic animal is similar to the "aesthetic" feeling of looking at human beauty, heavily conditioned by the anatomical limits of the creature, its specific and generic limits, one's own experiences of dogs, etc. More than that, the aesthetic experience is also contingent on the fact that a dog cannot not be a dog.

(e) Likewise with the sunset, with storm clouds blowing past, with the sublime landscapes, etc.

All of these (and many many more things in our daily life that are routinely called "aesthetic" and whose disciplines are often called "art") are prescribed, they are contingent on how they are made, used, found, etc. in social use. These things cannot be something else without ceasing to be what they are.

Works of art are made from the outset as fictions, as proposals and probationary things. That is, they are made from the outset to be what they are (painting, song, dance, story, etc.), but what they embody or represent is probationary, tentative, a rehearsal. I know that when I try to "look away" and disregard the connotations and references of the pictorial subjects, what is at play is specifically the non-contingent quality of a work of art.

A work of art—a painting, a story, a sculpture—can be anything. A football pass can only be that, and when someone proposes changing the convention so that a dropped pass is as good as a caught pass, most people would slough it off as a way to circumvent skill (or as a pointless Calvin and Hobbes exercise). If a dog looks or behaves differently, we generally think something is wrong; and when humans train animals to behave it ways that don't seem natural to them, many consider that harmful treatment. Dogs can (should) only be dogs. Sunsets? Every sunset is natural, for one thing, and it will always be red at the western horizon and blue at the eastern sky. To make it otherwise is something that can happen only in a work of art, which is free from the contingencies of actual existence and can be anything.

The sine qua non of a work of art is its fictitiousness, not its aesthetic qualities. Those qualities and the feelings they provoke come from the fictitious work, they don't precede it or inform it.

Beauty Is in the Ear of the Beseemer

Ever look dispassionately at ears? They're weird convoluted tissue flaps, hanging off the side of your head. We don't regard them as ugly. But if someone had eyelids that dropped in folds and looked like ears, we'd probably be startled or even grossed out. And, btw, our genitals are not that spiffy looking, when you think about them. But, for most of us, they are pleasant to apprehend.

Nature offers us many emotional occasions--sunsets, newborn babies, gathering storm clouds, raging rapids and tranquil pools, animals big and small with tooth and claw, lightning, offal and worms that eat offal, sulphur springs, slugs, etc. etc.--none of which is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, right or wrong.

There is no tragedy in nature, as there is no vindication or triumph. The earth shifts and kills living things, stones are crushed, waves speed ashore and strip the ground of all its coverage, fires burn uncontrolled until the ground itself is black. And then life continues, everywhere. Nature is not wrong for producing these things.

We may experience overwhelming feelings when we confront nature, when we look upon the Aurora Borealis or an avalanche, fields of flowers to the horizon and carnivores feeding on the slow members of the herd, etc. These feelings come down, basically, to awe or repulsion, not beauty or ugliness. Tics I hate, they make me cringe and recoil, but they are not ugly. They're repellent, disgusting, horrifying even. A blazing sunset, radiating beams through broken, burning salmon-colored clouds, fills us with awe at the grandness of nature, which at that moment is perceived as benign. But what happens a mere 30 minutes or hour later, when the last rays of the sun have departed and the world is wrapped in inky darkness? Fear and trepidation begin to rise in our consciousness. The awe of delight at the sunset changes to the awe of fear of nocturnal predators adapted to find their prey.

Beauty and ugliness are words we use to describe properties we have extracted from "out there" and placed "in here," in a work of art, to permit us to contemplate things that otherwise are terrifying or comforting.

There are only two emotions, or perhaps more precisely, only two proto-emotions: fear and security. These are our raw, visceral response to life, and they produce reactions like disgust at parasites or dung. In tandem with them, we have appetites that move us and give us impetus and motivation to behave in certain ways. Lastly, on top of the two basic emotions and our appetites, we have developed a wide array of social behaviors that are tied to them in amazingly subtle and nuanced ways, which we refer to as "our feelings." They are our gut reactions of security or insecurity in light of social behavior and social customs or cultural artifacts.

Views of importance

In publishing, inevitably there are the tensions that arise between the different participants in the drama of getting a document printed. From the actors' views of their roles in the process, the importance of the success rests squarely on their own shoulders:

To the author, the main work ends when he or she completes the text. The editor, designer, and printer all perform "after-market" services that put the finishing touches on the author's complete text.

To the editor, the author's manuscript is the raw materials, filled with the basic factual knowledge or content, but often poorly formed, which the editor then refines and completes and then passes along to the designer, who really is part of the process of getting the complete, edited manuscript printed.

To the designer, the author and editor work together to prepare the final content of the publication, but it really has no tangible form until the designer infuses the malleable text with it. The designer gives the author's ideas actual shape and completes the creative formation of the publication, and then hands it off to the printer, who plays a craftsman's role of executing the design.

To the printer, there would be no product without his or her work; all that precedes the printing is prologue: the author's edited text is a single thing, and even the designer's layout is a limited thing, until it is given actual physical existence on paper.