book
The Arts and the Social
100 Years of Arguments For Literature, Film, Music, and Art
by Gundela Hachmann
This monograph brings to the public insights and deeply held beliefs of renowned artists and intellectuals. As their lectures were meant to be publicly relevant and accessible, they contain succinct, acute, and persuasive defenses which speak to the power of artistic expression and to fundamental cultural needs ingrained in our human condition. In times of controversy about the value of studying the humanities or the arts, my book gives artists, scholars, educators, and students access to a wide array of powerful arguments which have in the US not received much attention beyond their local audiences.
In this project, I trace how understandings of authorship and creation evolved throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. I examine lectures in which artists from around the world share their views on work processes, motivations to create, and artistic self-understandings with general audiences. I read these lectures as performances of creative networks, i.e., as events in which creatively working individuals outline associations to other people, both past and present, and describe affinities with styles and ideas they rely on in their work.
To describe such networks, I turn to Bruno Latour who famously introduced a new approach to Social Studies under the motto Reassembling the Social. With his Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Latour challenged sociologists to leave behind long-established categories like “individual” and “society” and to describe from the bottom up how actors create associations for themselves. Similarly, this project seeks to reassemble poetics. In outlining ideas, controversies, and influences that govern creative endeavors, I avoid a top-down approach to literature and the arts that is common in literary theory and aesthetics.
Much like Latour, I start with instances of uncertainty, taking as points of departure frequently described struggles in explaining what the arts are, what artists do, and for whom they create. I use these uncertainties as resources to make traceable shared themes, values, and beliefs which, however tentatively presented, emerge from a comparative reading.
My goal is to build an understanding of poetics from the ground up, relying on these lectures to reassemble what actors in the arts value about the arts. The scope extends beyond considerations of poetry or literature and aims at describing principles of poiesis (Greek for ‘creation’) and poetic thinking in general as Amir Eshel, for example, develops it in his engagement of theories by Hannah Arendt and Hillary Putnam. Instead of starting out with definitions of what literature, art, music, and film are and which functions they fulfill, as literary and aesthetic theories traditionally do, I engage in what has been described as “comparative media archaeology,” an interart approach delineating how artists, ideas, artistic media, and objects interact.
Ultimately, this enables me to introduce an aesthetic pragmatism that seeks to explain how people do things with artworks and how artworks do things to people. I contend that artistic creation, or poiesis, plays a critical role in the formation of the social in that artworks replicate, proliferate, and question modes of self-construction or identity formation by creating a tension between complimentary visions of collectivity and association, on the one hand, and of individuality and disassociation, on the other.
Contents
Introduction
In the Introduction, I describe the corpus material and outline my approach of bringing ANT to poetics.
Chapter One
Leaving the Fatherly Arms of Aristotle in Search of Self-Expression
“Challenges in Redefining Poetics in the 20th Century” focuses on lectures given between 1926 and 1940. It describes the difficulties in establishing a lecture format that is not strictly academic yet includes critical reflections. It details the struggles of coming to terms with poetics that is not limited to poetry or literature. Figures of interest for this chapter are Charles Eliot Norton, Gilbert Murray, T.S. Eliot, and Igor Stravinsky.
Chapter Two
‘Non-Selves’ and Their ‘Non-Lectures’ on Art
“Contingencies of Performing the Creative Mind” discusses lectures given from the late 1940s into the early 1960s, including the first such lectures in Germany. It foregrounds ambivalences that lecturers express in presenting their public personas and suggests redefining artistic agency by taking intergenerational and interart networks into account. Key lectures to be discussed are by E.E. Cummings, Jorge Borges, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Ben Shahn.
Chapter Three
Myths, Magic, and Musical Grammar
“Dynamics beyond the Self” reviews debates about the societal purposes and origins of art in lectures given from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It traces how lecturers place creative work within larger cultural dynamics such as mythology, musical deep structures, mysticism, or the sacred, and portrays mutual dependencies of creation and interpretation in the arts. Central to this are lectures by Christa Wolf, Leonard Bernstein, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom.
Chapter Four
N(ich)ts
“Dissolving the Authorial I” is the first chapter on lectures given since the 1990s. It returns to strategies of ambivalent self-fashioning by discussing lecturers who present themselves as non-I or intertext, or who highlight the importance of self-deception. I use this to further my argument for redefining artistic agency as network-driven process. The chapter prominently features lectures by John Cage, William Kentridge, Andreas Maier, Thomas Meinecke, and Doris Lessing.
Chapter Five
Transgenerational, Transnational, Transdisciplinary
“Transient Selves and their Indebtedness” is the second chapter on lectures since the 1990s. It details how lecturers create networks to foreground relationality in their work. I identify ethical or aesthetic indebtedness as key factors that motivate creative individuals to associate with other generations, places, and people. To this end, I discuss lectures by Yoko Tawada, Wim Wenders, Daniel Barenboim, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.