![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Art of Becoming a Little Joke, or, Why Would Anyone Want to Become Such a Thing, Anyway?*
I continue with LiveJournal (which I constantly mistype as LieJournal) because it is just too much trouble to maintain more than one journal; counterforces.blogspot.com has fallen into desuetude, and I can’t even remember the passport for my Tumblr account.
And I know very well I ought to slim (mistyped “slime”) this thing down by moving the more grotesquely misguided entries to the Private category or some highly customized Friends-only category. As René Daumal says of allegorical mountain climbing in Mount Analogue (which, to my surprise, has become almost a collector’s item of an out-of-print novel), it is important, when you hit a dead end, to go back and erase your tracks, lest someone else follow you and get into even more serious trouble than you did.
But instead I find myself writing preliminary notes for this journal that I don’t post because their presuppositions are modified by something in the New York Times Sunday Gray Matter column before I can post them; we may be awash in neurotrash (which was recently the subject of one of those columns—neuroscience has become the 2010s’ equivalent of the sociobiology of the 1970s, in terms of overly facile explanations for human behavior) but neuroscience is nevertheless adding to our overall comprehension of the structure of human existence.
The problem is one of asking the right questions.
I have belatedly realized that (a) the thinkers I have most valued, who were not always the most fashionable ones, were the ones who asked questions that no one else had thought of asking; and (b) thinkers who ask questions usually feel obligated to act as though they already knew the answers to them, since we seem to respect questioners only when they behave as though they knew more than they in fact do know. (This meets the emotional needs of those who are easily impressed and inclined to follow their mentors slavishly, and those who derive satisfaction from showing up the obvious errors of would-be synthesizers and pathfinders and then gloating about it. This is a very large part of that segment of the population that thinks abstractly at all, as a survey of any season’s new books from university presses will demonstrate.)
I personally have concluded that the right questions to ask involve starting with neuroscience, making our way upwards through group dynamics into the cross-cultural perceptions characteristic of post-Geertzian anthropology, and using that anthropology to contemplate the possibility that the old cliché that no culture has the complete truth may in fact be so self-evident that it needs to be looked at differently, as a provocative difficulty. How can we ever be sure we aren’t looking at the wrong problems through the right cultural filters, or vice versa?
Playing semi-humorously with filter-switching is one way of approaching the issue. Think these thoughts but do not believe them.
Lately, however, I have been trying to apply all this to art criticism, so it shows up in a glass darkly (anyone who has ever tried to use an obsidian mirror to see anything—or fail to see it—will know what St. Paul’s phrase means), on such websites as artsatl.com or burnaway.org, and in a growing number of catalogue essays that may or may not find their way into online versions.
Actually, I have been trying to apply it to art criticism all along, but I used to puzzle out the implications in this journal a great deal more often than I do now that the state of research seems to be morphing with such rapidity.
See, for example, the offhand allusion in this past Sunday’s New York Times op-ed essay on Sherlock Holmes and mindfulness, which quotes a 2012 Emory University experiment with Tibetan monks to explain why the great sleuth’s brand of mental focus may stimulate the same segments of the brain that meditation does, a type of stimulation that will also help stave off Alzheimer’s. [The essay also contains a confusion between "discreet" and "discrete," but let that pass: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ]
I question the Alzheimer’s part of that assertion because there seem to be aspects of specific genetic inheritance involved in that disease, along with the buildup of biochemicals (remember when we were warned not to use aluminum cookware?). And I would quote, from the “Psychedelics, the Brain, and Shamanism” discussion between a Johns Hopkins researcher and one of the neuroscientists formerly involved in the Emory-Tibet Project, the observation that just because two practices involve altering the same parts of the brain, it does not mean that the two practices are doing the same thing.
*( note )
I continue with LiveJournal (which I constantly mistype as LieJournal) because it is just too much trouble to maintain more than one journal; counterforces.blogspot.com has fallen into desuetude, and I can’t even remember the passport for my Tumblr account.
And I know very well I ought to slim (mistyped “slime”) this thing down by moving the more grotesquely misguided entries to the Private category or some highly customized Friends-only category. As René Daumal says of allegorical mountain climbing in Mount Analogue (which, to my surprise, has become almost a collector’s item of an out-of-print novel), it is important, when you hit a dead end, to go back and erase your tracks, lest someone else follow you and get into even more serious trouble than you did.
But instead I find myself writing preliminary notes for this journal that I don’t post because their presuppositions are modified by something in the New York Times Sunday Gray Matter column before I can post them; we may be awash in neurotrash (which was recently the subject of one of those columns—neuroscience has become the 2010s’ equivalent of the sociobiology of the 1970s, in terms of overly facile explanations for human behavior) but neuroscience is nevertheless adding to our overall comprehension of the structure of human existence.
The problem is one of asking the right questions.
I have belatedly realized that (a) the thinkers I have most valued, who were not always the most fashionable ones, were the ones who asked questions that no one else had thought of asking; and (b) thinkers who ask questions usually feel obligated to act as though they already knew the answers to them, since we seem to respect questioners only when they behave as though they knew more than they in fact do know. (This meets the emotional needs of those who are easily impressed and inclined to follow their mentors slavishly, and those who derive satisfaction from showing up the obvious errors of would-be synthesizers and pathfinders and then gloating about it. This is a very large part of that segment of the population that thinks abstractly at all, as a survey of any season’s new books from university presses will demonstrate.)
I personally have concluded that the right questions to ask involve starting with neuroscience, making our way upwards through group dynamics into the cross-cultural perceptions characteristic of post-Geertzian anthropology, and using that anthropology to contemplate the possibility that the old cliché that no culture has the complete truth may in fact be so self-evident that it needs to be looked at differently, as a provocative difficulty. How can we ever be sure we aren’t looking at the wrong problems through the right cultural filters, or vice versa?
Playing semi-humorously with filter-switching is one way of approaching the issue. Think these thoughts but do not believe them.
Lately, however, I have been trying to apply all this to art criticism, so it shows up in a glass darkly (anyone who has ever tried to use an obsidian mirror to see anything—or fail to see it—will know what St. Paul’s phrase means), on such websites as artsatl.com or burnaway.org, and in a growing number of catalogue essays that may or may not find their way into online versions.
Actually, I have been trying to apply it to art criticism all along, but I used to puzzle out the implications in this journal a great deal more often than I do now that the state of research seems to be morphing with such rapidity.
See, for example, the offhand allusion in this past Sunday’s New York Times op-ed essay on Sherlock Holmes and mindfulness, which quotes a 2012 Emory University experiment with Tibetan monks to explain why the great sleuth’s brand of mental focus may stimulate the same segments of the brain that meditation does, a type of stimulation that will also help stave off Alzheimer’s. [The essay also contains a confusion between "discreet" and "discrete," but let that pass: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/opinion/sunday/the-power-of-concentration.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ]
I question the Alzheimer’s part of that assertion because there seem to be aspects of specific genetic inheritance involved in that disease, along with the buildup of biochemicals (remember when we were warned not to use aluminum cookware?). And I would quote, from the “Psychedelics, the Brain, and Shamanism” discussion between a Johns Hopkins researcher and one of the neuroscientists formerly involved in the Emory-Tibet Project, the observation that just because two practices involve altering the same parts of the brain, it does not mean that the two practices are doing the same thing.
*( note )
