The Grammar of Art

[mhuzzell]

I 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.

Comments

[kiss-cassia.livejournal.com]

The discussion on language reminds me of the Merleau-Ponty reading I've been doing, and the notion that I think Piaget had that children don't even really create true meaning for things until they have given it or learned its name, and that ties in with the importance of first-order and second-order speech.

What makes imagination original, in my opinion, is not necessarily the technical aspects (like composition and texture and all that), but that art is an interpretation of something ambiguous, and that our individual perceptions of reality vary; it is the combination of the subjectivity and the objectivity that can make it special or at least communicate in a way.

I don't know if this is the direction you were going with the topic, but that's what I got out of it anyways.

I miss you! Will you be in NC for Christmas?

[ragsix-bold.livejournal.com]

Urulas K Le Guin says something quite interesting along this line* but about narrative structure. Anyway, narratology aside, it's a human perogative to order life, to make sense of things. It's something I'm arguing about non-linear narrative structure is that allows for the order of presentation of events to be another outlet for a writer' expression; they are not confined to present a story chronologically, but can take a more creative view of time and events and causality, and use this discuss the nature of those things... sort of...

Anyway, yeah. You got it. Sorry for boring dissertation chat :S

*'Some thoughts on narrative' in *italics*Dancing at the edge of the World*end italics*

[iamunicorngirl.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're pointing out the obvious, even in artistic circles. I think people tend to take imagination for granted; they figure out what it is, what they think of it, etc. and yes, that's good, and push it asside. We need to be reminded to think about imagination once in a while!

The chomsky part at the end totally went over my head a little bit, ;) but I think I get the gist of it - that's one of the reasons I love the english language so much; it has more shades of meaning than most any other language, and such a broad range of meaning from recombining words. Sometimes I find myself thinking how the spectrum of colors seems so limited compared to the spectrum of words -- even though I'm sure an artist would see it the other way round -- and how you can't invent new colors (okay, literally you can, like "spicy peach cobbler orange", but there are only about 12-ish basic colors to have varients on) but new words are being invented all the time. Hm, went on longer than I intended lol ...