Arts in Education - Those Vicious Debates

What? Are there debates in the world of Arts in Education? And they're vicious?

I figure that anytime you get deep enough into one field, you will always uncover some kind of crucial debate. You should see how cutthroat it gets at those model railroad meetings.

But one of the BIG debates in Arts in Education is whether or not you can measure art, or the artistic experience. Or even should.

Well, since this is a blog, and I've already fully accepted the obsession with self that comes along with it, I will tell you my position.

You should never, ever, ever try to measure it.

Last semester a great philosophy professor named Catherine Elgin and a teaching fellow named Edward Clapp gave a lecture about art. And in said lecture, Mr. Clapp innocently suggested "you cannot measure the sublime"--which sent the audience into an uproar as they began to insist (shout) that you COULD measure the sublime.

May I just say that I agree with Mr. Clapp. Fervently.

Not only do I think the sublime can't be measured, I don't think we should even try. Because once you attempt to start measuring, you will create a condition in which the experience of the sublime will be less likely to happen. Too much measuring, and the possibility of the sublime will disappear altogether.

And Mr. Clapp is in good company. As we talked about this during section, I began to write down a list of authors who agree with Edward, who have agreed in their poetry, novels, and essays. They say it in various ways--sometimes it's a comment on science, or literary criticism, but I think the point is the always same. These authors are concerned with the mechanical mindset of modern times, that then gets projected onto the sublime, and therefore destroys something vital--destroys one of those rare things that make us feel truly alive.


Here is Edgar Allen Poe on what science can do to art:

"Sonnet--To Science"

"Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"


Here is David Foster Wallace on what kills the sublime in literature (and jokes):

"We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name "Who" for the interrogative pronoun 'who,' etc. We all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling not so much of boredom as offense, like something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis -- plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty."


Here is Walt Whitman, who like Poe wonders about the costs of using science to explain the sublime:

"WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."


From Frederico Garcia Lorca:

"These black sounds are the mystery, the roots that probe through the mire that we all know of, and do not understand, but which furnishes us with whatever is sustaining in art."

"[I]ntellect is oftentimes the foe of poetry because it imitates too much."


Goethe:

"[Paganini has] a mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain."


And though no one can ever fully explain what is happening in the lyrics of a Pavement song, I think this applies:

"And the stories you hear, you know they never add up
I hear the natives fussing at the data chart."


And jazz musicians always seem to know about these things before the rest of us do:

"If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know." - Louis Armstrong

"I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis


A couple of quotes from a previous post, which relate (and are so good they bear repeating):

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" - William Butler Yeats

"How wonderful it is . . . except after explanation." - Herman Melville


And why might all this be so important? Because I think, culturally, we are mired in an epidemic of numbness--of intellectual and spiritual deadness. A sort of desiccation of the soul that is so pervasive for so many, that it begins to just feel like life itself. And this is everywhere. For example, it might be the point of pornography:

"At the essence pornography is the image of flesh used as a drug, a way of numbing psychic pain." - David Mura

Or it might be the point of technical language or PR language:

"Every emotionally significant moment or event or development gets conveyed in either computeresque staccato or else a prepackaged PR-speak whose whole function is (think about it) to deaden feeling." - David Foster Wallace


In closing, (and to continue this quote-a-rama), I think this is one of those times when Wittgenstein is right, that "The solution is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem." The problem for many is how to measure the sublime. I think the solution is to not even make that a "problem" in the first place.

I know, I know, sometimes the only way to get money is to work within the system. Yes, if some evil company like Texaco (poisoning the Amazon) or GE (poisoning the Hudson) were to give me money to help a school where I was teaching, I would take it in a second. No, I wouldn't shortchange underprivileged kids by being such an ethical purist that I would turn down funds or opportunities that would help them.

But, BUT, I am always watching for that line, that exists somewhere, that when you cross it, you are no longer doing the work you intended and you are no longer the person you wanted to be. Or as Thomas Paine said:

"Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul."

Steve