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The Grammar of Art
Dec. 4th, 2008 09:20 pmI had this thing... it felt like a revelation to me, but I suspect that those more in touch with 'art' and 'poetry' and 'understanding' and things like that might just pat me on the head and say "Yes, Molly. Also, the sky is blue and the chemical symbol for water is H2O." But to me, this insight is novel. Let me know what you think.
See, I saw a film in which a character bemoaned her imagination -- all imagination -- for its lack of originality. How it can never create anything new; how any seemingly new material was just compiled from its sensory perceptions of reality. She found the thought highly depressing, but I can find only one reaction to her: that of course (and it has to be of course), she is completely missing the point. That its ability to reconfigure the elements of reality into something new, strange and novel that is precisely the power of imagination. That perhaps it is the only by the framing and reframing of our ideas through which we are able to understand reality at all.
A photograph, for instance, is not 'art' for what it contains, but for how it presents those contents. The subject of a photograph may have no art to it at all, but it is in the focus, the angles, the framing of the image that the intended visual message is presented. Again, it is understanding dependent of configuration, as much if not more so than content.
This is, I assume, why people say that learning new languages furthers one's understanding of 'what it is to be human', and other sorts of clichéd sentiments. What are words but imperfect frames of an idea, which through their overlap and juxtaposition we are able to discern a heightened understanding. Hence, too, poetry.
Chomsky's theory of innate grammar is now, as far as I understand, largely accepted by linguists. That we as people have an inborn ability, and perhaps a need, to classify and compartmentalise our ideas into discrete mental spaces, and arrange them alongside one another to produce an infinitely enhanced meaning. An infinite language from a finite vocabulary, by merely the rearrangement and varied repetition of its elements. Creativity, then, is the reification of that infinity.
See, I saw a film in which a character bemoaned her imagination -- all imagination -- for its lack of originality. How it can never create anything new; how any seemingly new material was just compiled from its sensory perceptions of reality. She found the thought highly depressing, but I can find only one reaction to her: that of course (and it has to be of course), she is completely missing the point. That its ability to reconfigure the elements of reality into something new, strange and novel that is precisely the power of imagination. That perhaps it is the only by the framing and reframing of our ideas through which we are able to understand reality at all.
A photograph, for instance, is not 'art' for what it contains, but for how it presents those contents. The subject of a photograph may have no art to it at all, but it is in the focus, the angles, the framing of the image that the intended visual message is presented. Again, it is understanding dependent of configuration, as much if not more so than content.
This is, I assume, why people say that learning new languages furthers one's understanding of 'what it is to be human', and other sorts of clichéd sentiments. What are words but imperfect frames of an idea, which through their overlap and juxtaposition we are able to discern a heightened understanding. Hence, too, poetry.
Chomsky's theory of innate grammar is now, as far as I understand, largely accepted by linguists. That we as people have an inborn ability, and perhaps a need, to classify and compartmentalise our ideas into discrete mental spaces, and arrange them alongside one another to produce an infinitely enhanced meaning. An infinite language from a finite vocabulary, by merely the rearrangement and varied repetition of its elements. Creativity, then, is the reification of that infinity.
