the routes of wonder, take two
Feb. 4th, 2014 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculum“our hearts are restless...and we don’t know why,” part two
I am afraid that, based on my earlier musings on why we should ever have become lovers of impossible wonders, I am going to inflict some reflections of the imaginal and the imaginary on my readers without benefit of citations of most of the theoretical volumes that have probably influenced my ideas.
Lonnie Holley’s performance “Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants” is an excellent test case, because a good many people will react to it with dismissive irritation simply because for them, the whole premise of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s birthday is arrant nonsense. Those of us who delight in it may find pleasure in its incongruity plus its intuitive formalism: after all, space shuttles and elephants are logical opposites when it comes to soaring versus being difficult to get off the ground, but both possess the quality of being large and attention-getting, hence obscurely appropriate for a celebration of royal power (think ancient Roman processions and contemporary Air Force flyovers). The off-the-wall numerology borrowed from the Book of Revelation signifying the population of redeemed souls further reinforces the notion that something very important and dignified is being symbolized by a juxtaposition that, nevertheless, is incongruous enough to be hugely amusing. Whether this leads to serious reflections on what constitutes incongruity and why we find it funny—that depends on who we are.
The amusement or disgust at violations of the rules of “things that go together” and “how things ought to be done” is functional enough in terms of maintaining social order, but it does raise the question of why “we find him, as far back as we can trace, making this thing other” (misquotation of David Jones somewhere in The Anathemata, I think, and in Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body). We can understand why our remotest ancestors buried objects with their dead (whether they did it because they expected the dead to use them in the afterlife or because objects once used by the newly dead made them feel nervous). The motive for metaphor is a little more obscure; the part for the whole, or the abstract image that apparently conveyed as much meaning as the exquisitely rendered animal or cartoon shaman(?) in the cave painting.
It’s curious that Aby Warburg should have intuited the relevance of the question when he used his researches among the Hopi to ponder the implications of Renaissance iconography and image-making in general—a career choice that horrified both his relatives who still practiced Judaism and his assimilationist family who had found a language-centered Protestantism an easy enough leap from a militantly aniconic Jewish tradition. (I started out with the Warburg Institute folks when I was twenty-two, but this latest meditation is based on Michael P. Steinberg’s “Aby Warburg and the Secularization of the Image” in the 2013 survey volume Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, eds. Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick.)
I can see how the capacity to pursue multiple lines of thought that turn out to be useless dead ends would actually be evolutionarily useful—the solution that no one had yet thought of comes out of all that maundering and idea-mongering, more so than from simple trial and error. But how we as a species got so fundamentally wedded to dysfunctional pursuits, behaviors that make individuals and sometimes whole societies less likely to survive—well, that was a question being discussed in anthropology half a century ago, as belief in the dogmas of functionalism waned. The notion that a dwindling number of economists and far too many evolutionary psychologists still operate as though functionalism were the default position is nothing short of dismaying. There is a large enough number of human beings who actually do operate according to what seems to them the most immediately advantageous course of action, and who have no use for any aspects of their own culture that doesn’t offer immediate sensory rather than intellectual gratification, to make us wonder why the more functionless imaginative options have survived, plus why the excessive social rules that such folks treat with cynical disdain ever became so excessively codified in the first place. As in the once-contemporary idiom that comes to mind at the notion of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating the Queen’s birthday: “that’s just wrong.”
I am afraid that, based on my earlier musings on why we should ever have become lovers of impossible wonders, I am going to inflict some reflections of the imaginal and the imaginary on my readers without benefit of citations of most of the theoretical volumes that have probably influenced my ideas.
Lonnie Holley’s performance “Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants” is an excellent test case, because a good many people will react to it with dismissive irritation simply because for them, the whole premise of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s birthday is arrant nonsense. Those of us who delight in it may find pleasure in its incongruity plus its intuitive formalism: after all, space shuttles and elephants are logical opposites when it comes to soaring versus being difficult to get off the ground, but both possess the quality of being large and attention-getting, hence obscurely appropriate for a celebration of royal power (think ancient Roman processions and contemporary Air Force flyovers). The off-the-wall numerology borrowed from the Book of Revelation signifying the population of redeemed souls further reinforces the notion that something very important and dignified is being symbolized by a juxtaposition that, nevertheless, is incongruous enough to be hugely amusing. Whether this leads to serious reflections on what constitutes incongruity and why we find it funny—that depends on who we are.
The amusement or disgust at violations of the rules of “things that go together” and “how things ought to be done” is functional enough in terms of maintaining social order, but it does raise the question of why “we find him, as far back as we can trace, making this thing other” (misquotation of David Jones somewhere in The Anathemata, I think, and in Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body). We can understand why our remotest ancestors buried objects with their dead (whether they did it because they expected the dead to use them in the afterlife or because objects once used by the newly dead made them feel nervous). The motive for metaphor is a little more obscure; the part for the whole, or the abstract image that apparently conveyed as much meaning as the exquisitely rendered animal or cartoon shaman(?) in the cave painting.
It’s curious that Aby Warburg should have intuited the relevance of the question when he used his researches among the Hopi to ponder the implications of Renaissance iconography and image-making in general—a career choice that horrified both his relatives who still practiced Judaism and his assimilationist family who had found a language-centered Protestantism an easy enough leap from a militantly aniconic Jewish tradition. (I started out with the Warburg Institute folks when I was twenty-two, but this latest meditation is based on Michael P. Steinberg’s “Aby Warburg and the Secularization of the Image” in the 2013 survey volume Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, eds. Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick.)
I can see how the capacity to pursue multiple lines of thought that turn out to be useless dead ends would actually be evolutionarily useful—the solution that no one had yet thought of comes out of all that maundering and idea-mongering, more so than from simple trial and error. But how we as a species got so fundamentally wedded to dysfunctional pursuits, behaviors that make individuals and sometimes whole societies less likely to survive—well, that was a question being discussed in anthropology half a century ago, as belief in the dogmas of functionalism waned. The notion that a dwindling number of economists and far too many evolutionary psychologists still operate as though functionalism were the default position is nothing short of dismaying. There is a large enough number of human beings who actually do operate according to what seems to them the most immediately advantageous course of action, and who have no use for any aspects of their own culture that doesn’t offer immediate sensory rather than intellectual gratification, to make us wonder why the more functionless imaginative options have survived, plus why the excessive social rules that such folks treat with cynical disdain ever became so excessively codified in the first place. As in the once-contemporary idiom that comes to mind at the notion of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating the Queen’s birthday: “that’s just wrong.”
