art, technology, and imagination: an essay starting from the late Mildred Thompson

Recently I have been dealing with a posthumous retrospective in Europe of the work of my onetime colleague the painter and printmaker Mildred Thompson, who, when she no longer was financially or physically able to maintain a studio, took up composing music with the aid of computer programs and who declared, shortly before her death, that we were on the verge of giving up “smearing mud around with sticks the way we’ve been doing ever since we lived in caves.”

And recently davross and anselmo_b have had an LJ exchange about the books of Graham Hancock, which I hadn’t thought of in a very long time. This has, as usual, set me to thinking about unanswerable questions and inspired amateurs who sometimes push us into asking the right questions and just as often end up in the byways of crackpottery.

The problem being that since such inspired amateurs are constantly pushing past their own limits, even their completely valid statements end up sounding demented, Hancock being a case in point.

But for now I want to focus on the problem of imagination and technology. (And I shall be recapitulating many things that I have gleaned from other people, and I shall be stating some things that are so obvious that everyone has thought them. As usual.)

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my subject headings don't elucidate much, anyway: but this is part two

I realize (glossing my longer remarks as usual) that what has been surprising me about the nature of the human imagination is that, just as the humanists would insist, it does not behave the way we could expect a rational economic animal to behave, or a strict-behaviorist-model animal, either: it would appear that what gets invented first is not what is most needful for survival, but what is easy to invent even though it doesn’t foster survival; and even the fast-track leap from basket weaving to textiles or clay vessels to clay sculptures is not strictly what utilitarian models of the human species would lead us to believe.

All of this is obvious in the extreme, but I remain puzzled by theories that seem unable to take the non-utilitarian dimensions of human imagination into account. Freud, of course, had no problem grounding the non-utilitarian aspects of human development in our persistent irrationality, and Nietzsche was even more rude in his assessment.

Farmers would perhaps find nothing odd about the model of human development currently being propounded, suggesting that it is easier to put up buildings that don’t fall down than to figure out how to make crops grow in a land of capricious weather patterns.

While I am discussing models of the economic animal, I note that David Brooks’ column in the April 3 New York Times performs an adroit sleight of hand in opposing the “Greed” versus “Stupidity” explanations of the origins of the global financial crisis; as though it were not greed that led so many to put so much misguided faith in the infallibility of the elaborate econometric models that assured them of failsafe success.

It is embarrassing when a ‘60s songwriter is more accurate than one of our more thoughtful right-wing pundits: “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” But of course Paul Simon’s line applies to David Brooks himself, and to me, and to you, too, and most of all to Paul Simon…though the fact that his seemingly absurd marriage to Edie Brickell has been one of celebritydom’s more successful unions suggests that he may have more self-knowledge combined with street smarts than most of us creative types.

And I know that that is a particularly ridiculous leap of free association; but, to quote Bill Arnett's irony-laden quote of a commonplace phrase, that's part of my charm.