Art is the Thing

Our scientific understanding of sound frequencies, musical instruments, and analog and digital technologies for conveying sound waves does not ever fully explain a Mozart piano concerto, nor does our understanding of music theory.

Neuroscience does not explain the piano concerto, and it does not ever fully explain the writings of Shakespeare. But because neuroscience is the newest kid on the block and has a trendy cachet, some believe it can explain Hamlet and all other art in ways that will fundamentally alter our understanding.

But I don't believe it.

Morgan Meis's article "This Is Your Brain on Art," in The Smart Set (March 17/11) discusses these issues in his review of V.S. Ramachandran's book The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for what Makes Us Human. The article is well written and a balanced discussion, although Meis at least somewhat believes that the findings of neuroscience will deeply shift our relationship with art.

In his review, Meis points out that Ramachandran does not claim to explain the ultimate meaning of art, just that "making art and appreciating art seems [sic] to be universal in the human species"  :

Neuroscience is not meant to replace other standpoints from which we appreciate and analyze art. Ramachandran thinks, in general, that neuroscience can make significant contributions to aesthetics without otherwise encroaching on the humanities. Our love of Shakespeare, he argues, is not diminished by our understanding of universal grammar.

Ramachandran gets it because he understands the science and understands its limits, but so many non-scientists want to base every field of study and area of human endeavour on neuroscience. So we have brain-based Shakespeare, brain-based leadership, brain-based art history, brain-based relationships, etc., etc., etc....

Individually, it is a personal choice to base one's life on misunderstood science written about in popular culture, but we shouldn't rush to re-write social policy and whole academic disciplines based on it. (I've written about this in literary studies; there is a trend towards neuroscience as full explanation of literature.)

I believe that our relationship with art is not most importantly about hard-wiring and synapses, that is about the material. The importance of our relationship with art is existential and beyond science.

Some of Ramachandran's research (which I discussed in Mirror, Mirror) is about phantom limb pain and how the brain responds to a mirror image in place of a missing leg. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, presents the play within his play to hold up a kind of mirror image to Claudius, an image that contains Claudius's missing guilt.

The more things change, the more they stay the same! The mechanism in both images - the Renaissance understanding of the psyche and twenty-first century understanding of the brain -  is that the viewer will respond as if the missing element is indeed present and act accordingly.

Ramachandran's mirror image and neuroscience, generally, contribute to our understanding of humanity and art. But, like Shakespeare's play within the play, it is only part of a much larger, complex, and maybe inexplicable whole.

Meis writes: "We are going to go forward into the unknown in the quest to make art fully knowable and we'll deal with the consequences when we've arrived, joyful in our accomplishments and sad, too, at the inevitable loss of all that has been left behind."

Loss? I don't believe it.

Well-Deserved Criticsm

Popular, trashy romance novels have hackneyed characters, doggedly predictable plots, and no sentences more difficult than what a primary schooler could handle. They are painful to read.

Slightly more literate romance novels have slightly less hackneyed characters, perhaps an interesting plot twist or two, and sentences for middle schoolers. They are sometimes well-written, but are still painful to read.

Most romance novels are, purportedly, written by women. Regardless of the gender of writer and reader, they are still painful to read.

Emily Gould believes that "women are often the cruellest critics of other female writers." In her article "What Are Women Fighting About?" in More Intelligent Life (October 29/09), she discusses the particular venom she feels is levelled by women at women who offer traditional, vapid female characters - characters who are dependent, materialistic, and want someone to sweep them off their feet and take care of them by providing as much cash as possible.

Gould generously lists the aspects of good writing she finds in one particular novel, but says that she hates the novel, the "retrogressive plot," and the female characters and worries that readers will find the character portrayals representative of real women like her:

This worry elicits the cruel female response:

So I become, once more, the kind of person I can't bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn't project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood. This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are "off-message" because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types.

Female critics are right to give these novels a pass and to review them with a highly critical eye, but not because they don't fit with an agenda, and not because there is limited publishing space. As Gould's one example of a cruel critic says (and it's all she says as example!), "The novel is just terrible."

Female (and male) critics are right about these novels because they offer characters who are stereotypes, acting in stereotypical ways, in stereotypical situations. Even though the descriptions, locales, and outfits may be finely drawn and the sentence structure admirable, romance novels are painful to read.

Men and women who support the ongoing fight for women's equal place are right to criticize vehemently. The continued portrayal of women as dependent, sexualized children has real consequences in the world; it is more than an agenda issue. It is sad, disheartening, and frustrating, no matter who promotes the stereotypes.

To say that these novels and their authors are" giving women what they want" is to try and give them a legitimacy they don't deserve. Romance novels, like so many other aspects of pop culture, play to the lowest common denominator; they carry the messages of advertisers promoting stereotypes of those most likely to buy their products; they require no mental effort; they are easy and comfortable; they are often based on the worst aspects of humanity. They are thoroughly and readily criticized for many reasons.

Gould's critique of female critics pits women against each other much more insidiously than any outraged and open female criticism of romance novels. She takes what is healthy anger at the continued promotion of damaging stereotypes on one hand, and legitimate criticism of bad novels on the other and reduces them to that demeaning question Freud asked - "What do women want?"

Gould's title "What Are Women Fighting About?" invokes Freud and diminishes the well-deserved criticism of romance novels to the level of a bitchy catfight.


(photo credit)
(photo credit)


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The Belatedness of Criticism

In his recent article "Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Bauerlein laments what he sees as redundancy in a vast sea of literary criticism, which demonstrates

the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object—what a poem means or a painting represents—humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.

Bauerlein argues that the overwhelming number of works comes from not only the demands of theory, but also as the consequence of the publish or perish imperative for those who seek tenure - especially for those experiencing belatedness in criticism. What to do when all the good stuff's been said?

For tenure decisions, Bauerlein recommends that committees look only at 100 pages of material. He further suggests that

subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.

The shift in subsidies should occur because the numbers of students who do not attend or pay attention in classes is quite staggering:

in the 2007 Your First College Year survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute, ...70 percent skipped class, 62 percent "came late," and 44 percent fell asleep. Their engagement with instructors outside of class is similarly tenuous. Their engagement with instructors outside of class is similarly tenuous. On the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, 38 percent of first-year students "never" discussed ideas from readings or classes, and 39 percent did so only "sometimes."

More "research into teaching and...classroom and curricular initiatives" as the solution to the problem puts the onus on faculty to somehow counter the effects of the digital age Bauerlein writes about in his book The Dumbest Generation.

The digital age and resulting drop in reading, the self-absorption in juvenile pursuits and interests are surely the business of faculty, but should hardly drive research in the humanities.

I agree with Bauerlein's premise that there is too much redundant performance criticism out there, but I do not agree with his solutions. Still, it is refreshing to see someone tackling the issues.

I would like to invite Mark Bauerlein to my soiree.