Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005

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IMAGINE

a likely way to find Art and Literature wherever they may hide

by

José Luis Guijarro

1. Imagine

Imagine that our goal is to talk about something called “irony”. Now, the first move we have to make when we decide to talk seriously about something is to point to the likely object or event we name with words. So, imagine …

Imagine that we concentrate on the meaning of an expression. Is it in the decoding process of a given sentence that we may find irony? For instance, suppose that we hold that university professors are all very intelligent. Is there any feature in the meaning of this linguistic unit that could remotely indicate irony? Clearly not. However, you all know that we may utter this sentence ironically.

Imagine further that, for the above reason, we decide that if irony is used while we indulge in some sort of conversational interchange we may perceive perhaps a different tone of voice, a special facial or hand gesture, etc. We may conclude that “irony” is, say, a comic tone of voice, a lifting of eyebrows and a smile. So that, if you say university professors are all very intelligent while adopting all of the aforesaid tonal and postural features you have indeed achieved irony.

Incidentally, and concentrating on a hand gesture for just a moment: imagine that you say that same sentence (i.e., university professors are all very intelligent) in a French cultural milieu while putting your index finger close to your eye. This will be also considered another instance of irony, because, as you know, the gesture in French (mon oeil!)  means more or less, “come off it, mate!”. But if you do the same movement in a Spanish cultural environment, it will indicate that on top of being intelligent, university teachers are also awfully clever. No irony here!

My question in this case is: does that hand gesture embody irony in France and not in Spain? Or is that a silly question to ask in the first place?

It seems to me that it is. For, logically, irony must exist before we adopt it in our verbal and gestural behaviour. Irony seems to be a human possibility that is actualised in one way or another. It would be strange to point to external marks, that may be natural or cultural, as the actualisation of that human potential.

What if, in another move, we decided that irony was a pragmatic inference that we derive from the premise of what this sentence means and from the premise that the lifting of eyebrows, the comic tone of voice and, in a French situation, the touching of an eye invite us to interpret? This decision might not be considered so clearly absurd as the former two. After all, we have a communicative process in which we take account of the decoded meaning of a verbal expression processed in a context to achieve the ironic sense intended.

Our conclusion, then, would be that irony is the processing of information decoded from verbal stimuli in the context of other behavioural information (i.e., lifting eyebrows, tone of voice, pointing to an eye, etc.). Wouldn’t that approach miss the point too?

Imagine …

Imagine that we try to specify this in a simple formula, thus:

1.      Irony = x decoded meaning + lifting of eyebrows + comic tone of voice (+ pointing to an eye in France).

We could go on adding marks, but we would not be describing what irony is. Rather, what we do is to describe how we sometimes recognise irony. But what do we recognise?

It is well known that in modern pragmatic theory, irony is considered a human attitude. And a human attitude in this context is explained as an embedding process by which a high order representation sometimes colours an embedded representation with that ironic hue[1]. It is said that the high order representation would, more or less, amount to I dissociate myself from, in which case, the formulaic rendering of the description would look like this:

2.      Irony = [I dissociate myself from (x)]

The theory is much more elaborated, of course, but as it is it gives us some important information: it shows that any utterance (that is, x ) might be processed ironically. So, from that point of view, it is immaterial what the meaning of the linguistic unit is. This seems to be quite straightforward with what we know about irony. We might say that 2 represents the necessary condition for irony to appear, namely, that for it to exist, one needs an information processing device that is able to metarepresent information in a, let us say, detaching attitude about its purported meaning. Therefore, the tone of voice, the lifting of eyebrows and the pointing to an eye are only behavioural marks that help us process information in the manner sketched in 2. However, we don’t need them all the time, for we may have the following set in which irony is almost self-evident without any marks:

3.      a. John who is forty believes in Santa Claus

b. John is very intelligent

So far so good.

However, as I said when I started this paper, this whole story is just … imagined.

My purpose is not to talk about irony at all. There are lots of papers on that topic which follow the direction I have tried to sum up above.

2. My purpose is to talk about LITERATURE.

Before entering the subject, and in order to avoid unnecessary repetitions, I think I may restrict the term “literature” to the concept of written art. Therefore, from now on, I will talk of art in general, until I return to the literary specificity later on.

Human beings have been trying to describe or define art for centuries and nobody has come up with a generally accepted theory about it[2]. Kuhn would say that all these theoretical efforts are pre-paradigmatic. That is, nobody has a clear paradigm from where the research into that topic could start with some degree of rational hope to achieve an interesting conclusion. Possible explanations for this state of affairs have tended to rely on the spiritual component that, presumably, underlies art, which cannot be reduced to the so-called cold analyses that science offers. If we accept such a view, no matter how pleasant it might seem for our self-esteem as a higher species, the state of pre-paradigmatic approach will never be overcome.

I want to propose that the reasons for this pre-paradigmatic situation could be a lot more simple and, therefore, easily disposed of in order to reach a full paradigmatic level from which to build a consistent theory of what art in general and literature in particular is. It has to do with social representations.

Our most common representation of how we are able to mean something in our communicative actions is looking at it as a way of pulling things out of a sort of container; that is, we speak metaphorically about the meaning or sense of a given linguistic expression (be it a word, a sentence or a whole text; an utterance or a set of them forming a discursive unit) as if it were the content it somehow holds. This metaphoric representation forces us to concentrate on things that happen inside the container, as it were. Hence, research seems to concentrate solely on artistic objects or on literary texts: they are indeed the initial elements we normally take into consideration in our search for explanations of art and literature.

There is of course another well extended representation of Art and Literature. It has to do with the creative ability of gifted persons who are able to do things in a special artistic fashion.

This seems to be the idea of :

(…) “special” can indicate that not only are our senses arrested by a thing’s  perceptual strikingness (specialness), and our intellects intrigued and stimulated by its uncommonness (specialness), but that we make something special because doing so gives us a way of expressing its positive emotional valence for us, and the ways in which we accomplish this specialness not only reflect but give unusual or special gratification and pleasure (i.e., are aesthetic) (Dissanayake, 1992: 54).

Later, however, this same author decided that “making special” was perhaps too vacuous[3]and she, therefore, searched for other terms:

The characteristic of human nature that I am calling here “elaborating” (elsewhere (…), I called it “making special”) is, like art and religion, often overlooked by evolutionary biologists. (…) To the unsentimental gaze of an evolutionary biologist looking for “selective value” elaborating is truly perplexing. What ends could it possibly accomplish? (…) Elaborating would appear to interfere with fitness, not to enhance it. (Dissanayake, 2000:134).

The idea of “elaborativity” in one of the arts, literature, was already present in Pratt (1977); her theory was centred in action as the title of her book, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, clearly shows. She distinguished between assertive speech acts whose essential condition is that the speaker tries to make the hearer aware of a non evident state of facts which the speaker believes to be the case, and the assertive tellable speech acts in which two further conditions are needed: (1) a displaying condition which invites not only to extract information, but also to evaluate it; and (2) an elaborativity condition in which redundancy did not violate Grice`s perspicacity maxim (be brief and clear!) if it enhanced elaborativity.

However, Pratt acknowledged the fact that she had no clear idea as to how this counter maxim would work, although she related it tentatively to the gricean maxim of relation (be relevant!). As a matter of fact, Grice himself did not know how to describe this maxim; moreover, he was almost sure that when an explanation was found, all the other maxims would be unnecessary.

Both researchers argue, I think rightly, against the representation of art as a describable characteristic of objects or texts. They adopt wholeheartedly the representation that art is a sort of behaviour. So, for Pratt, literature should be described as an elaborated kind of (speech) act, and for Dissanayake this special behaviour should be the central topic of an art analysis. Notice, however, that both authors find a small problem there. Pratt thinks that she must explain why elaboration goes against one of the gricean maxims, and Dissanayake, on the other hand, warns us against daft biologists who may think that art has no evolutionary reason to exist. I don’t know about such short-sighted biologists, but I do know about a well known cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, who believes that,

(…) after seven chapters of reverse-engineering the major parts of the mind, I will conclude by arguing that some of the activities we consider most profound are non-adaptative by-products. (…) For the same reason it is wrong to write off language, stereo vision, and the emotions as evolutionary accidents –namely, their universal, complex, reliably developing, well engineered, reproduction-promoting design- it is wrong to invent functions for activities that lack that design merely because we want to ennoble them with the imprimatur of biological adaptativeness. Many writers have said that the “function” of the arts is to bring the community together, to help us see the world in new ways, to give us the sense of harmony with the cosmos, to allow us to experience the sublime, and so on. All these claims are true, but none is about adaptation in the technical sense that has organized this book: a mechanism that brings about effects that would have increased the number of copies os the genes building that mechanism in the environment in which we evolved. Some aspects of the arts, I think, do have functions in this sense, but most do not. (Pinker, 1997: 525-6).

I will try to show those possible functions in this paper, by making a hair-splitting distinction that I have never found before. After all, art cannot be represented as a kind of weird behaviour which happens miraculously in some humans, for it is distributed in every human group or society.  May we not build a new sort of representation from which to discover there need not be a necessary condition of elaborativity in order to describe art? That is, if we eliminate this special characteristic, we might then be able to explain the existence of art through an evolutionary general account.

Imagine, now, that we belong to another culture in which the most common mental representation of human communication is neither a container, nor a behaviour, but, rather, that of a big slash which all participants try to mend stitching it as best they can[4]. We would, then, I believe, begin  our analysis taking into account the stitcher’s mental abilities in mending the slash. That is, in order to understand a sentence, say, he put it then on top of the other one, all you do is to process the referring expressions in an inferential fashion thereby giving it a given sense. There is no trace of perceivable behaviour in this operation. So, if you want to describe what happens when a hearer interprets such a sentence, you’d better forget about (speech or otherwise) acts or behaviours and concentrate instead on analysing the mental functioning of human beings which, as even Pinker acknowledges, can be safely related to an adaptative history of our species.

3.  The basic cognitive representation

It is widely accepted in cognitive studies that our mind stores and retrieves information in two basic modes[5]: directly (i.e., I am reading now), in which case we consider it a fact; and indirectly or, as it were, embedded into another representation, in which case the first order representation is the fact, while the embedded representation might not be (i.e., I believe that [you will be convinced by my argumentation]). Now, some of the “facts” that embed representations are currently considered attitudes, such as, I (don’t) believe[X], I (don’t) want [X], I (don’t) like [X], I (don’t) think [X], I (don’t) value [X], I (don’t) agree with [X], etc. This is precisely what I intend to propose here: that the starting point to tackle the problem of where art is shifts from characterizing texts or behaviours to describing human attitudes. When I talk about (or try to describe or explain) art, in other words, I will be thinking about a way of processing information in a metarepresentative fashion. Of course, it may be discussed whether or not other species are able to metarepresent information in the same or different degree than we do. But I think we have to agree that, to our present knowledge, no other living being can experience art (and even less, literature!), although some might be moved by certain types of stimuli. If we accept that thesis, we must explain, then, what the literary experience amounts to and what effects it achieves.

My present thesis, then, is that art (and literature) must be considered an elaborate functioning of human psycho-biological devices which may be called cognitive for short. The preliminary (but necessary) condition for it to appear in the world is the existence of a mental device which has the ability to process embedded information easily. Without that capacity, art and literature will not exist. I have named art and literature, but in reality, many things which are specifically human would be impossible as well; strangely enough, those which have been almost always associated with our so-called “soul”. Fancy that: our spiritual powers may be reduced to a capacity to metarepresent information![6]. This preliminary condition is of course necessary, but it is too general to become a sufficient condition for art and literature to appear. We now need to find out, however, what characterises these artistic kinds of metarepresentations in the life of human beings.

In order to simplify the wealth of all possible human attitudes, I will concentrate on the following two: I like [X] and I value [X]. Both are problematic for human beings, as many animals, like some things more than others. However, liking A or B (or hating C and D, for that matter) need not necessarily be embedded representations; The general way for them to be (for animals and in many occasions for human beings) stored and retrieved is direct: they are facts that mould our reactions to stimuli. However, as I am doing now, humans are also able to embed their likings into high order representations in order, for instance, to describe or analyse them. Now, if I process the fact that I like, say, gazpacho, sundowns, that woman over there, my new boss, and whatever, trying to analyse what it amounts to, I will surely not coincide with my description of why I like Hamlet, The Gioconda, Moses, The 5^th Symphony, or a flamenco dancer. That is to say, I like them all, but in a different manner. If my purpose is to explain ART, I must discover a way to distinguish the I like [Ike, Paris in the Springtime, your eyes, etc] from the I like [that picture of Rothko, the venus of Milo, and so on].

The problem with liking, then, is twofold: on the one hand it may not be an attitude but a fact of our personality. In that sense, it appears also in other animals and we have agreed, I think, that ART is only a human possibility. On the other hand, when liking is indeed processed as an attitude, we must also characterize it (for instance, I like as art [X]) to distinguish it from other possible attitudinal likings.

Therefore, although one of the above problems remains, I tend to prefer the attitude I value [X] as the likely starting point for art. It is true that animals tend to choose among alternatives, and so do we. But I think that we may distinguish between choosing and valuing, the latter being always an embedding representation, that is to say, an attitude. In any case, as I said, we still have the same problem as with the liking attitude. We value a scientific theory, a joke, a tender action, art … in different ways. Are we never going to get a break?

We might. But before we do, let us pause here and sum up what we have said.

As with irony, I have humbly reduced the unbounded greatness of art to a simple formula like this:

[Evaluate as  art (X)]

A formula, by the way, is a representation which takes into account the form of an argument and makes it explicit so that one is able to visualize or otherwise manipulate it, taking into consideration the very gist of it.

In this simple formula (much too simple, as we have said above), the important thing to notice, as with irony before, is that the artistic object, namely, X, might be anything. This implies that no characteristic of X will ever be crucial in describing or explaining ART. As the formula also shows, the concept that characterises the evaluation attitude, namely, art, is outside the domain of X. It must be analysed, precisely, as what it is: a given type of an evaluation process.

Notice, then, the three possibilities we have considered in this paper:

1. ART = {elaborated X}

2. ART = {special behaviour which causes [X]}

3. ART = {a kind of evaluation of [X]}

We could have reversed the order of 1 and 2 for, after all, manufacturing causes an object to appear. However, I prefer this order for it is easy to see where the locus of ART seems to be in each of the above statements. In 1, ART is to be found in the object itself. Therefore, we need to analyse and describe common features of artistic objects if we want to understand ART at all. In 2 and 3, the object itself is not important to discover what ART is. In 2, the behaviour of making (special) is what gives ART its character. In 3, the kernel of what must be described in order to explain ART is the attitude that one adopts while processing some information.

What are the benefits and disadvantages of using one of the above formulae instead of the others?

With 1 we have the advantage of being able to perceive physically some of the object characteristics, analyse our reactions to those stimuli, and imagine a general enough statement that comprises all these interactions. If we find a way of doing that we will have described ART. From then on, every object showing similar characteristics will be considered artistic. The trouble is that human reactions are context conditioned; one cannot possibly analyse all the features of objects, nor can we decide beforehand what the context of interpretation will be in every single case to be able to establish these interactions. Moreover, if we perceive a copy of an “artistic” object we will have no reason to despise it for not being creative  (whatever that may mean!) for, what features of an object show that quality?

With 2, the advantage is that we attribute intentional character to ART. Artists want to act specially in order to create ART; if they convince everybody else that their behaviour is artistic, whatever they do while behaving that way must be perceived as art (although it may be disliked, of course). The problem here is that ART pertains only to the artists, to individuals with that  godly touch; but nobody knows why they have it and how it works. Or, better, we sure know that every single stimulus must necessarily be ostensive in order to stimulate (the eye, the ear, … the brain, etc.). This is indeed one of the most important adapted operations that help survival. The evolutionary cognitive theory of communication, Relevance Theory, has a complete description of how this works in the field of communication. According to it, this “elaborative” trend is not only a normal way to achieve more information in communicative acts, it is the only way to do it. That is, elaboration is treated as a general case of intentionally complicating stimuli (so that they need more effort to process) in order to attain more communicative import. So, there is indeed a very strong reason for elaborating activities and make them salient. For one thing, communication in general is characterized precisely as an ostensive act. If you are not able to do something special with your behaviour you will very likely fail to communicate your message. There are many examples of this: in some places where mendicity is widespread, beggars try all sorts of  “elaborated” messages to make people pay attention to their sorrows. In the world of e-mails, as well, some unwanted messages try to initiate the process of communication by making “special” claims that attract people’s attention. And so on. It is difficult for me to accept that elaboration per se is a necessary and sufficient condition for art to appear. It exists, of course; but it can’t possibly be a criterial consideration to distinguish artistic acts of communication from other non-artistic ones.

Returning to Dissanayake’s ideas for a while, she has the merit to acknowledge some uneasiness with her “making special” or “elaborative” notion:

Other people have also found "making special" too vacuous.  I have been trying to improve my formulation of that In my most recent book (…), I call it "elaboration" and in even later papers I call it "artification" and try to operationalize what it is that people do when they "art" (or "artify", since there is no verb for that activity).  Most recently, I have "operationalized" what I mean by tying artification to the ethological concept of the ritualization of behavior. (And I say that the mother-infant interaction is a ritualized behavior in that fundamental ethological sense). Artification is composed of one or more of the following: formalization, repetition (sometimes with variation), exaggeration, elaboration, and surprise. These activities may overlap -- e.g., repetition is a kind of elaboration or exaggeration, etc. (Personal communication)

However, I am afraid that changing the terminology will not necessarily help her to overcome it for, from my point of view, the problem does not lie in the words used, but rather in the locus where one thinks art is hiding. You make something special for many reasons; one of these reasons is that you want art to appear; so you know before acting that you want this precise effect. How do you know? Where is this notion before you act in order to bring it about? This, we would think, is the central problem.

If we adopt view 3,  this will result in important advantages. For one thing, either objets trouvés, or texts that were not meant by their authors to be considered literary will become artistic when we process the information we extract from them in the way specified by the formula. That is, there is no preference in favour of the artist in order to determine what art is. As in the De Sica film, Miracolo a Milano, anybody (in that case a poor orphan living in a derelict slum of that Italian city) can turn “anything” (in the film it was a sundown) into an instance of ART and convince his neighbours to look at it that way, so much so that, when the sun eventually disappears, everybody applauds with relish. Of course, this does not prevent artists from trying to ART. But they don’t achieve it because they are able to publicly represent one of their individual representations with more or less accuracy or vividness; that is, one may be very good at showing inner representations without anybody experiencing ART at all. However, at the very moment an artists adopts the attitude schematised in the third formula above, whatever she or he is doing becomes ART.

You may not be convinced that the capacity to represent publicly may not be the kernel of what ART really makes us admire and evaluate. Try to read the sentence again: I am not saying that this capacity will never be the object of an artistic evaluation. It may be, as anything else, or even, it normally will be –given our historical pre-paradigmatic social representation of ART. What I insist upon is that, although there are strong reasons to admit that accuracy, vividness, elaboration, etc. in public representing are commonly considered a sufficient condition for ART to appear, they are neither sufficient nor necessary to describe it.

It seems certainly a fact that human beings like to represent externally some of their individual  representations (i.e, ideas, emotions, feelings, etc.). And they are, indeed, mighty gifted in so doing, not only by shaping things with hands and help of manufactured tools (stones, hammers, brushes, colours, etc.), but also by translating them into words. There are different processes involved here. The first one is the process by which we convert certain stimuli that come from the material world into formal mental representations in which the material component is lost. We may think about a person, but the person is not physically present; we may remember the taste of a nice dish, but we can’t actually eat it. I stress this obvious fact because “formal” seems to be a scary word for many people suggesting complicated formulae that give a reductive view of reality. Our structured set of mental representations is what we may call “language”. It is not necessarily a communicative language –as a computer language is not communicative either: it is a formal and organized store of representations. Schematically, we may distinguish two basic kinds of representations: implicit and explicit[7]. In the first category we find what are normally called “images”; the implicit notion refers to the fact that the relationships of the constituent elements of images are somehow analogical to the constituent parts of the material model and, therefore, don’t need to be made explicit. The explicit category, on the other hand, depends on linguistic abilities, for it is the realm of propositions. These type of representations have no analogy whatsoever with the material model; hence, they must explicitly state the relationships of their constituents.

Naturally, the propositional type of representations is a human species-specific trait which is absent in other living organisms. It is the necessary step to be able to speak. As Levelt says:

(…) we can move from one type code of  to another, depending on the requirements of the task. If, however, the intention is to speak, then the code must eventually be prepositional in nature. (Levelt, 1989: 73)

The second process involved here is the one by which we represent our individual images or propositions publicly by behaving in one way or another. This communicative behaviour makes these individual representations manifest to others, giving them a sort of material existence again. In some cases, the material results are analogical (statues, pictures, dishes, etc.); in others, the material results (oral or written texts, music, etc.) are not analogical in any sense but, because we process them in certain ways, we are able to represent publicly as well.

There are of course differences in the capacities of human beings to represent accurately their own private representations. And, as I said before, the ability to do it has been often mistakenly taken as a necessary condition for ART. This is mainly the reason why some people are unable to find ART in modern efforts that do not represent anything either explicitly or implicitly. However, if we are able to distinguish two evaluation processes, namely, the one that considers the capacity to represent things in different formats, and the ART evaluation proper, we will be approaching the level of descriptive adequacy which, until now, has been obscured by this confusion.

The search is even more complicated than trying to distinguish between two evaluation processes. First of all, what does evaluation mean in our context? After all, we may evaluate a scientific theory, a joke, a tender action, … you name it, we may evaluate it! Hence, there seem to be different values one may assign to objects or texts. On the other hand, values look like highly individual judgements. What one appreciates others may loathe, find uninteresting, or vice versa. How on earth are we supposed to describe a general condition that is typically considered highly individual?

3. The problem is twofold

(1) Are there universal types of value for every human being?

(2) How is this universal value related to art?

Life is the most valuable goal of the living. What this means is that when you are alive you do everything in your power to go on living. However, as we saw above, according to some researchers (Pinker among them), art experiences have no direct relationship with this universal value. It seems to be a strange evolutionary growth with no function for our well-being. Now, if we accept Ken van Cleave’s (2000) opinion that

Epistemologically, the concept of 'value' is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of 'life.' To speak of 'value' as apart from 'life' is worse than a contradiction in terms. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible.

We will have to admit, then, that only living beings may evaluate. This function must provide benefits and be, therefore, a result of evolutionary selection. However, that does not immediately prove that all value computations, (i.e., those that are inbuilt in living systems from birth, and those that are learned or even inferenced by their cognitive devices) are selective. The difficult thing, then, is to find the value that makes art and literature so universal among humans. It has to be something, on the one hand, specifically important for us, something that hinges on our unique (or so it seems to us) condition; and on the other hand, a value which is very closely related to our “life value” in one way or another (pace Pinker!).

One striking feature of our human condition is our feeling of individuality. The rest of the animal species seem to react to others in a general way, except, perhaps, when breeding. Apparently, then, in nature at large, the process of growing de-individualises (i.e., parents and offspring seem to forget their individual characteristics that made them interact when breeding). As humans, however, we have certainly another experience: our mental growth seems to achieve a strong individuality which some call the “ego”, the “subject”, the “conscious mind”, etc. This process of individualisation is clearly related to our faculty to embed representations into other representations: we develop a representation of ourselves that is built up on many important experiences of our life, and we have it there as a topic to be observed and acted upon. Nobody, in her/his right mind, seems to be able to escape this ego-formation process in her/his natural development.

But there are efforts (mostly associated with religious feelings) to dismantle this historical subject metarepresentation in order to achieve a new relationship with the world. The yogi try to clean up their spirit to achieve what they call “Nirvana”. So do the Zen Buddhists with their “Satori”, or any other mystical school we know about, Christian nuns and monks included. The question now is, why do these people strive to achieve this sort of de-construction of their selves? They say that they get in contact with some sort of divinity and this is certainly perceived as valuable.

If we try a more down-to-earth speculation, we will have to ask ourselves what the reason is for such a high evaluating attitude. What could be so valuable for a human being in her attempt to erase the whole (if this were indeed possible) or part of her personality and experience things in a novel way?

It may have to do with our striving for survival. For our human ancestors, finding new perspectives in their wild environment could be a way to try and solve dangerous problems that threatened their life constantly.

I suppose that many changes in our perceptual and mental evolution had to occur before our ancestors could manage to associate some formal renderings with existing things out there. But once they got to that point, we may well imagine that the first human being who could represent some schematised forms on a surface would have caused some social stirring; people who happened to watch these drawings might have suddenly realised that their own picture of the world had to be radically changed for, from then on, they were able to represent things that had not been there before. No wonder that some of these representations became religious tools in one way or another enhancing the (at least, represented) power to survive in the minds of the wizards and the community at large.

In the same manner, once our evolution permitted us to achieve complex messages with the help of our inbuilt and subsequently imprinted linguistic devices[8], the narration of another type of world with another type of actors in it (or with features that were half true and half imagined) would also have caused a mind cataclysm which changed the personality of those who participated in those communicative interchanges. No wonder, again, that most of the primitive narratives we have any notice of were also considered religious renderings in one way or another.

In his very interesting account on how religion may have evolved, the French cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer (2001) holds that there doesn’t seem to be a simple mechanism in our minds which might be considered the necessary and sufficient condition for religion to be a universal feature in human culture. There is, according to him, an interplay of mental operations going on which can be all traced back to some innate device with a special evolutionary function.

(…) many cultural creations, from visual art to music to the low status of tanners to the fascination of corpses, are successful because they activate a variety of mental capacities, most of which have other, yet very precise functions. In other words, a lot of human culture consists of salient cognitive gadgets that have a great attention-grabbing power and high relevance for human minds as a side effect of these minds’ being organized the way they are. (Boyer: 2001: 235)

We may join, I think, in the idea that the birth of art and literature was closely related to the appearance of religion in the human species, and that, moreover, some of the effects of our processing both types of information (i.e., religious and artistic) are very similar indeed. It follows that, although the necessary pre-condition for both to exist is our embedding capacity, we still need to describe, first, which could be the necessary and sufficient conditions for art;  and, second, whether these conditions should be considered general conditions or, rather, special conditions for every artistic field or, even, a mixture of both.

For instance, let me start with artistic texts, what we normally call LITERATURE. The first thing that strikes us is that humans use linguistic texts to help them communicate accurately some of their individual representations. So, in literature, at least, the communicative import of the artistic experience can’t be questioned. But it must be clear that this central feature of a textual object is not criterial for describing its artistic value. As a matter of fact, other arts need not be considered communicative in any interesting way, although a lot of traditional thinking about art tends to point to its communicative essence[9]. I prefer to distinguish between real acts of communication and acts of individual expression with no necessary communicative goal. Of course, some results achieved by the latter may in turn be processed as information by other people. And this may give the generalised impression that they were communicative acts in the fist place.

In any case, the fashioning of a text is (normally done as part of) a communicative act. That is, the text needs to be processed in a context. The results of the decoding operations that give us the meaning of the text and of the inferences that interpret its sense in a given context are the communicative effects one obtains in that joint process which some people name “discourse”.

In other words: in human communication, discourse is our species-specific way to manifest some of our thoughts to other people with the help of our linguistic competence. This linguistic tool is the means by which we are able to transmit and receive messages with a surprising degree of accuracy. Mind you, the tool is not essential for communication to take place; it is only important for the accuracy of our messages. Texts are written records of discourses[10] and so, they are also used to help retrieve thoughts written by other people. This takes place in a complex fashion in which written symbols, representing mental concepts, fire decoding processes coupled with inferencing processes until we are able to get at a mental representation of the sense of the message[11].

The problem with texts is that the coded symbols that appear in them do not normally include linguistic meanings which might be interpreted as [THIS IS A LITERARY TEXT]. But even if they did, the text should undergo a special interpretation process. As with irony, then, literariness is not a thing that texts have, but rather something we manage to process while interpreting them. However, in every culture, there are social marks that, in a way, force us to interpret some texts literarily, as we saw happened with ironical marks. Understandably, however, given our current mental representation of literature, this has made some researchers (notably, those that belong to the so-called Reception Theory) believe and hold that art in general and literature in particular are situated in those social markings. The receivers and not the texts, this time, are the starting point of their analysis. However, what these receivers do is to recognise marks that are socially distributed and which, therefore, force them to find art or literature (i.e., pre-existing mental processes) in certain objects or texts. Now, these marks are also associated with texts in one way or another: either in their formal aspect (rhyme, alliteration, socially accepted ways of ornamentation, and so on), either in the senses of the messages that may be interpreted (love affairs, action and suspense, scenes of everyday life, and whathaveyou) or, even, in their characteristic implementation (literary books of all sorts, special surroundings -like trees around which people gather for artistic occasions, and so on). Our persistent cultural representation of literature as a container of things, be it meanings or social marks, is thus not really overcome by supporters of this reception theory of literature.

I mentioned that the normal development and functioning of the so-called ego was sometimes intentionally halted and even reversed, obtaining in the process a seemingly valuable result. But what are the evolutionary benefits that this voluntary striving achieves? It would seem that reversing the normal development path is indeed, as Pinker believes, a useless thing to do from the perspective of natural selection. But it might be considered otherwise.

As a matter of fact evolutionary theory is well aware of a striking phenomenon which is, typically, a sort of reversal from the usual trend in evolution. Let me explain briefly what this amounts to: there are mutations that carry species to a sort of dead end. That is, the organic structures are too rigid to adapt to a suddenly fast changing environment and, hence, they may eventually disappear as species. Probably, that’s what happened with the big saurians of the past. However, there seem to be devices to prevent this outcome (generally called paedogenesis) which may either accelerate the sexual maturity of individuals (i.e., progenesis) giving them a chance to breed before they die[12], or slow down their somatic maturation (i.e., neoteny) thereby making them more malleable and adaptive to changing conditions of the environment. Many researchers consider humans a clear case of neoteny, which would account, among other things, for our being hairless apes, have a permanent curiosity and subsequent ability to learn, and remaining playful during a long span of our lives.

Of course we may not derive easy analogies from the biological evolutionary phylogenetic mutations to the mental ontogenetic changes, although it is some times said that ontogeny (i.e, the life history of an individual) re-cnacts phylogeny (i.e, the evolutionary history of a species). Still, in some cases, when a mental set-up is unable to cope with  a given problem one may try to process more available information, but if this fails and the solution is not achieved, a good move is to go back to some point where, as it were, it may be possible to take a different route of thought, thereby changing the blocked mental set-up which prevented a convenient outcome. That is: sometimes a resetting of the mental machine is needed to have a better perspective, a creative one. Note that the creative bit really characterises the new mental view of the problem and its solution. It is something that has to do with mental computations, not with their results, although one may tend to assimilate them and call them creative as well which is, to my mind, what has tended to keep the research into creativity somewhat blurred.

Even admitting that newly born baby minds are not blank slates[13], their mental context is void of acquired representations. It seems they are not even able to clearly distinguish figures, colours or sounds. More than that: to them, the boundaries that separate their sucking mouths from their motherly breasts do not exist. They are one with their environment, if we want to put it that way. And yet they do process incoming information which permits them to start grow mentally and create their own internal world which will be used gradually to process relevant stimuli (the way Sperber & Wilson describe). My question is: has this process of creating a mental world anything to do with the creation of our own self? It seems reasonable to suppose that our self is another aspect of our view of the world and that the growing of our mental context is also the locus of our mental auto-consideration as a separate and unique ego.

Now, it is my contention that we may have an unconscious memory of that former unity and of our awakening as individual selfs which we interpret rightly as creative. If we are able to retrace the process, at least in part, we feel an elation that has to be explained, at least tentatively in evolutionary terms. In other words, the paedogenetic move backwards in our mental development may well be coupled with some kind of positive feeling in order to make it worth the while.

To put it in other terms, if we agree with the idea that emotions are pre-wired devices which somehow help us concentrate on special problems which have to be solved immediately if we want to survive[14], we will consider them safety devices which, as everything else, might be conceptualised and memorised. Maybe this conceptualisation and memorisation is the source of what we now call feelings or sentiments. It seems clear that the emotion that drove our need to become a human subject has some kind of positive conceptualisation in the sentiments that we store. If we are able to reset the mind to a point where it will start a new subjectivity representation, if we happen to be creative, a thrilling sentiment is surely triggered by this. That feeling, together with a possible stored trace of our total belonging to Nature might be the origin of this human experience.

Two questions remain: how on earth do we manage to reset our mental world in order to feel creativity in this vein? And how much resetting do we need to achieve in order to identify our creative feeling with the one that made us human subjects? I think I have an answer to the first question; the second one is for me the field that is now open for further research on the topic of art and literature.

Let me become fastidiously materialistic: if we consider that a scientific theory is one whose operations may be put to work as if it were a (virtual or abstract) machine simulating the real phenomenon we are trying to analyse, then we are close to it at this very moment.

Those that use personal computers have surely come to a point where the machine does not work smoothly any longer. Normally, in those cases, what needs to be one is to reset the device, erasing files and even some programs; some of those programs are, then, substituted for others and eventually the computer will run better than before. Suppose you accept my idea that resetting the mind is a similar process -with a positive type of emotion related to it. If our theory is to work scientifically, we will have to be able to relate the resetting of the computer with a computing set of operations which mimics what I intuitively described as elation.

Fair enough, but let us turn to the first question above. How do we reset our minds? In computers the thing is done by erasing and subsequently reinstalling some software in them. But we can’t do that with human minds!

Imagine that we adjust the popular notions “objective” and “subjective” to the frame of reference we use in this paper. We will then argue that, more in keeping with it’s word forming process, “objective” does not really mean real or according to material truth (whatever that is!). An objective analysis must refer to the fact that we are analysing an object, a scientific model; something which, contrary to everyday implications, prevents us from facing reality (again, whatever that might be!) in a direct way. What we really do is turn away from and look at it, as it were, through the mirror (i.e., the model) we have created in order to explain and otherwise manage to handle it for doing things with it, among which, for storing it in our minds for potential retrieval when the occasion calls for it. “Models”, in that sense, then, are to be related to our mental views of the world at large (scientific models being only a small part of all our possible models), views that we have created in our individual maturing history and which, at the same time, help us interpret incoming stimuli and prevent us from looking at them in a totally new way. A subjective process, on the other hand, would point to the direct contact of the individual subject with reality, with no intervening models, mirrors or theories that keep it permanently separated from us.

What we need is a way to convert mental manipulation of models (i.e., objective processing) which help us to go around the world in a confident way into a paedogenic experience which may give us back the flavour of our direct contact (i.e., subjective experience) with the real world out there. And, as far as I know, there are possible descriptions of this process in … mystic tradition (!), like the following:

Before one begins to study Zen, mountains are mountains (…); when, after the right teaching by a good Zen instructor, one achieves an internal vision of The Truth, mountains are no longer mountains (…); but later, when one reaches the Home of Rest, mountains are mountains[15].

In other words, if according to Sperber and Wilson’s theory, when we conceptualise things in our minds, these mental concepts trigger three kinds of information that may be used to further process our understanding (or any other kind of manipulation) of the environment (i.e.,  information that has to do with the formal analysis of the concept; information that situates it in a web of relation with other concepts; information as to which linguistic elements code the concept in one way or another[16]), we may be able to become aware, after serious training, that none of these informations by themselves or together, are the real thing out there. This, as it were, cleaning process paves the way to a direct (i.e., subjective) perception of that real thing out there. Of the World at large …

Two steps, then:

First step: cleaning.

If the normal way to become a human subject is to process information that is relevant and has sufficient contextual effects, and if what we want is to convert our minds into new-born devices again ( that is, if we want to reset them), why not overflow our normal perception and conceptualisation devices with lots of irrelevant information? It is said that Zen masters teach their pupils to clean their minds by giving information with no relation whatsoever with existing mental information. The koans are indeed actions or verbal expressions that have no sense whatever and which are used as answers (?!) to the questions some pupils ask. But we do not need to travel that far. Some of our own Christian nuns and monks happen to weaken their bodily structure by a lot of fasting and lack of sleep. At the same time, they indulge in long prayers that are repeated hundred times over … until they become as clear as koans. That is, they have no real sense whatsoever. There are of course other ways (Yoga exercises, turning around like Dervishes do, etc.) to train people to process external stimuli without the help of given (or, better, acquired) templates which may distort the UNITY that some claim existed in the beginning.

Second step: illumination

I am wary of using the word “illumination” for the state of a mind that all of a sudden, or so they say, perceives the wholeness of the real world out there. But let me use it for lack of a better word. The description of these states by some of the mystics from almost all religions[17] is akin to what we know about newly born babies since Freud or Piaget, namely, that there is a symbiotic consciousness where the self is not yet separated from the world: a unity which, even as we mature, keeps attracting us in many ways. For instance, every individual has the inborn knowledge that it is almost impossible to survive alone in the world. This is probably the outcome of a sociability instinct which, while we are busy developing our subjectivity, keeps an evolutionary trend towards belonging somewhere, i.e., a human group. It is logical to suppose, then, a tension should develop between the centrifugal creation of a separate self and the centripetal strength of that social instinct.

Could not that longing to belong extend further than what the social instinct commands? As I said above, it seems that our former unity with the world leaves a trace in our consciousness which makes us, as it were, look back in anxiety for having lost a valuable peaceful state in which  no unbalancing tensions were active. Hence, to recover it must be a pleasant endeavour.

The problem with cleaning,  illumination and the possible elation felt through those processes is that they may be too vague and general. By sudden loss of memory (in an accident, an illness, etc.) we may consider that the mind of the person concerned has been reset in a total manner; yet, few people report elation in those cases. So, the resetting I have proposed cannot be all that radical. Something must remain in order to achieve the desired effect.

For a long time, I have found this to be a dead end with no easy way out into more promising descriptive avenues. Intuitively, it seemed to be the case that mystical and artistic experiences were the result of those processes where some resetting took place; but I was unable to figure out how this would work in an abstract machine (i.e., a scientific theory) simulating an elated mind of the sort mentioned above.

And then I came upon a likely beginning of a solution in the work of Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, in which he distinguishes three related creative experiences or, as he termed them, reactions:

1.      The AHA reaction by which an important part of our mental existing context used to interpret (a part of) reality is put into contact with another one thereby giving a totally new context of interpretation. As it happens, Koestler’s idea of an existing context seems to be too strong, for it rests on the traditional idea that contexts are somehow given, whereas we keep creating and relating contexts as our acts of communication proceed[18]. However, once we are taught (and convinced!) that the earth is round and that it turns around the sun, we no longer use the idea of a flat earth and of a travelling Phoebus as a premise in most contexts of interpretation[19]. That is to say, in one way or another, the learning of a new point of view (scientific or otherwise) changes the ground assumptions that we use in forming contexts of interpretations. In his own words:

The creative act does not create something out of nothing (…) it combines, reshuffles and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perceptions, associative contexts. (…) Take the example of Gutemberg (…). His first idea was to cast letter-types like signet rings or seals. But how could he assemble thousands of little seals in such a way that they made an even imprint on paper? He struggled with the problem for years, until one day he went to a wine harvest in his native Rhineland, and presumably got drunk. He wrote in a letter: “ (…) I studied the power of the wine press which nothing can resist …”. At that moment, the penny dropped: seals and the wine press combined gave the letter press. (Koestler, 1967: 214-215).

2.      The HAHA reaction by which we process different contexts that are somehow incompatible producing a kind of mental clash which, according to Koestler, is at the base of the humorous experience. I think Koestler was more accurate in that description than Paul Grice who, almost ten years later, characterized irony (a kind of humour) in a somewhat more traditional way, even though he clothed it with elements of his theory of human communication. Grice (1975) simply stated that irony appeared when the hearer could recognize that the speaker was flouting the maxim of truth, while abiding by the general cooperative principle. Which amounts to saying that she meant the contrary of what she said. However, it is Grice and not Koestler who has had more influence in subsequent research on irony.

I wonder how a Gricean account would explain the ironic component in the following scene. Assume you repeat that you love having a pet in your flat if, and only if, it is well trained and will never urinate on your costly carpets. Assume further that your mate appears one day with a nice little black dog telling you that it is indeed well trained and will therefore never spoil your carpets. Next thing the dog does is go and urinate on your best carpet. Instead of getting furious, you are of an ironic character and you simply state:

“I do love well trained pets that don’t urinate on carpeted floors!”

Which is exactly what you love, of course. But, in this case, after the not-so-well-trained dog has indeed spoiled your carpet, this is processed in a clash of contexts, the one you were assured to hold, and the one you now perceive as being real.

Moreover, Grice account cannot explain jokes, like the following:

“Doctor, my husband is very ill. He washes the car every weekend!”

“Madam, this is not an illness. You should be proud of your husband’s cleaning habits!”

“No, Doctor. He washes it in our bath!”

Nor could Grice offer an explanation to the uneasy fact that sometimes we are forced to laugh at people stumbling and even falling down. However, Koestler’s account explains the fact that a person who is normally perceived in a context where she acts like a human being, is suddenly taken out of this context and is, as it were, put in another, one in which we normally interpret other types of movements, say, a pile of books falling down, or some other non living objects.

3.      The AH reaction by which we are able to integrate different contexts of interpretation and thereby experience a resetting situation in which the world is somehow enlarged for us. Here is what Koestler has to say:

The polarity between the integrative and self assertive tendencies is (…) in all hierarchic order and manifested in every level, from embryonic development to international politics.

(…)

The single individual considered as a whole, represents the apex of the organismic hierarchy, but at the same time he is a part, and elementary unit in the social hierarchy.

(…)

The self transcending emotions show a wide range of variety. (…) their common denominator is the feeling of integrative participation in an experience which transcends the boundaries of the self  (Koestler, 1967: 220-221. His italics)

As Koestler states, the three reactions are creative in their own way. All of them make use of different contexts, but process them in slightly different ways. Let us metaphorise them in my computer simulator to make them more explicit. When one of our programs in the machine is not able to handle a special task, we look either for a new and more advanced version of it or for a different program that does the work. This would be the AHA situation. The computer becomes better fitted for solving problems.

Suppose now that the computer has two different programs that are able to try the same task but achieve totally different effects. If the would run together at the same time, the machine would stop or, if we want a real simulation, we could have introduced into it a sort of stuttering sound (like ha ha ha ha, perhaps?) that announces that it is stuck somehow.

Finally, if we created a machine that could integrate the workings of every possible WORD program, together with any WORDPERFECT one in existence, and with any available LINUX text program, would we not have created an enthusiastic machine that integrates every possible outcome in unity?

I am of course aware that the above metaphors are extremely rough and need a lot of polishing in order to make real simulators out of them. My purpose, for the time being, is to point to the likely place where I think research should concentrate, in order to discover a causal theory about the necessary and sufficient conditions for art to appear.

To be fair, I think there are big problems to be solved in this respect. For instance, there is no evident mechanical link between a “resetting” of the mind (in any of the three creative ways Koestler proposed if that should prove positive) and the elation I wishfully thought should occur. As I said above, a lot of thinking needs to be done in this shady area of my proposal. Nevertheless, my polishing seems to be less complicated than that of some researchers that look for art in aspects of objects. And even easier than those, like Dissanayake, who think that it hides in the special action of a person. Notice that I don’t have to leave the world of the mind: the resetting of (one significant part of) our interpretative potential happens in the same place where values or positive valence, elation, gratification, pleasure, etc. abide. Other scientific (i.e., mechanic) linking endeavours, on the other hand, have to jump from the world of elaborated objects to the world of human special behaviours to the world of the mind cognitive universals. At least, seeing it this way, it seems that my necessary somersault is three times easier than theirs; although that does not preclude, of course, that I might break my neck all the same.

How do I pretend, then, to get away with not acknowledging the obvious fact that we grant our admiration to people touched by the divine finger of the Creator and who, therefore, are able to make artistic objects -some of which really enthuse us? I will show you how, if you bear with me a little longer.

Let me turn to people first. As I said above, there are indeed human beings who know how to represent publicly their own individual representations with a high degree of accuracy in the process we generally name “human communication”. I also mentioned that, as humans, we are all used to making our individual representations into propositions, thereby preparing them to be used as linguistic utterances in our communicative actions. So the urge to represent publicly our inner representations is a normal trend in human beings. Dawkins has explained this urge as parallel to the urge our genes have in trying to expand by means of the sexual drive. He claims that private representations are similar to genes (he calls them “memes” for they are stored in memory) in that respect. This explains the interest humans have in public representations. Although Dawkins ideas are far from self-evident (for, contrary to genes, memes change almost every time they infect new minds), they may give us a hint as to why we like expanding our representations and are also extremely interested in those of other people.

I don’t know whether we are also naturally endowed to publicly represent our private images with the fabrication of public images. Some researchers hold that all babies are able to draw and mould intuitively, but I really have no proof of it. In any case, the drive to make those inner images public must be of the same kind as the one that pushes us to communicate tirelessly. It is conceivable, then, that if one acquires great mastery in representing whatever it is to be represented (i.e., parts of nature, imaginary ravings, feelings of all kinds, etc.) one will strive to go on doing it and trying to perfectionate the technique even more, especially when other people react with interest and even wonder at our craftsmanship. But as I have already sated, although this sort of evaluation is more often than not mixed up with the art experience, I really think it should be distinguished from it in order to clarify the art issue.

Let us turn to artistic objects, then. If you go along with me in the notion that the drive to make inner representations public is universal, you may agree as well that some achievements in this line are more interesting than others. That is, they are apt to be evaluated, compared, etc. I have speculated before that the first public images achieved by human beings must have caused enormous interest. If, moreover, they were indeed used as magic renderings of some environmental set up (game to be caught, for instance), it is probable that the mental blending of two contexts (the ecological and the mental) produced a strong feeling of awe which may be at the beginning of the art experience. So, what first became a source of transcendental functioning that blended with other modules to create those human “divine” architectures of representations we call religions, might have also been the source of the art experience which, as religion, has been overcast with numerous other natural modularised drives or also with socialised expectations.

This is why, from my point of view, indexes of these drives or expectations are currently introduced the artistic objects as marks so that we may know that they are to be evaluated as art experiences. The fact that some function very easily (for instance, a painting of Tizian or Rebrandt achieve their intended effects nowadays without any effort, although it is not always the case that they did work that way in their own time) and some don’t (for instance a painting by Tàpies or Rothko) is to be explained historically. That is, perhaps one of the reasons why they operate easily in some cases and not so much in others is that we are able to process them as public representations of some other representations in a learned way. It is said that the dowayos and some other African ethnic groups are unable to process the representation of a person out of a photograph. I wonder how these people would react to the Gioconda and to a picture by Vassarely. I am almost sure that they would find a lot more excitement in the latter object, for the marks of Op-art are much closer to their own artistic (or religious, or whatever) marks.

What I want to stress is that although objects embodying public representations of private representations may be valued as either accurate or rather elaborate achievements, as the case might be, this fact alone does not guarantee that they become art. For art, I insist, is not a thing and not even an activity. It is a way of processing the information we are able to extract from things, activities, relationships, events, feelings, communications, etc. A way in which, according to Koestler’s idea, the old context of interpretation is somehow erased and a new one is used instead, albeit with the trace of the old context continuing to work at the same time producing a wholesome experience of a new sort, namely ART.

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