The Basic Dilemma of the Artist


By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

"I know of no 'new programme'. Only that art is forever manifesting itself
in new forms, since there are forever new personalities-its essence can
never alter, I believe. Perhaps I am wrong. But speaking for myself, I know
that I have no programme, only the unaccountable longing to grasp what I see
and feel, and to find the purest means of expression for it."

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff


The psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable.

We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws
of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external
events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a
corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity
ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can
never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: the soul is nothing but our self
awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed
solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is
uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no
methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively
ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain
that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of
the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the
exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our
gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course,
science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a
pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other
words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the
pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events
coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The
serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the
other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous
occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is
not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity
is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS the
pain itself.

A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly
demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the
same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect
rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.

The gap is even bigger when we try to apply natural languages to the
description of emotions and sensations. This seems close to impossible. How
can one even half accurately communicate one's anguish, love, fear, or
desire? We are prisoners in the universe of our emotions, never to emerge
and the weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her
own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a
dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can
ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is
incommunicable. People - in the very far future - may be able to harbour the
same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could
directly take over another and make it feel the same. Yet, even then these
experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us
to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of
emotions.

Still, when we say "sadness", we all seem to understand what we are talking
about. In the remotest and furthest reaches of the earth people share this
feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate
circumstances - yet, we all seem to share some basic element of "being sad".
So, what is this element?

We have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional
languages and that no dictionary is possible between them.

Now we will postulate the existence of a meta language. This is a language
common to all humans, indeed, it seems to be the language of being human.
Emotions are but phrases in this language. This language must exist -
otherwise all communication between humans would have ceased to exist. It
would appear that the relationship between this universal language and the
idiosyncratic, individualistic languages is a relation of correlation. Pain
is correlated to brain activity, on the one hand - and to this universal
language, on the other. We would, therefore, tend to parsimoniously assume
that the two correlates are but one and the same. In other words, it may
well be that the brain activity which "goes together" is but the physical
manifestation of the meta-lingual element "PAIN". We feel pain and this is
our experience, unique, incommunicable, expressed solely in our
idiosyncratic language.

We know that we are feeling pain and we communicate it to others. As we do
so, we use the meta, universal language. The very use (or even the thought
of using) this language provokes the brain activity which is so closely
correlated with pain.

It is important to clarify that the universal language could well be a
physical one. Possibly, even genetic. Nature might have endowed us with this
universal language to improve our chances to survive. The communication of
emotions is of an unparalleled evolutionary importance and a species devoid
of the ability to communicate the existence of pain - would perish. Pain is
our guardian against the perils of our surroundings.

To summarize: we manage our inter-human emotional communication using a
universal language which is either physical or, at least, has strong
physical correlates.

The function of bridging the gap between an idiosyncratic language (his or
her own) and a more universal one was relegated to a group of special
individuals called artists. Theirs is the job to experience (mostly
emotions), to mould it into a the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of a
universal language in order to communicate the echo of their idiosyncratic
language. They are forever mediating between us and their experience.
Rightly so, the quality of an artist is measured by his ability to loyally
represent his unique language to us. The smaller the distance between the
original experience (the emotion of the artist) and its external
representation - the more prominent the artist.

We declare artistic success when the universally communicable representation
succeeds at recreating the original emotion (felt by the artist) with us. It
is very much like those science fiction contraptions which allow for the
decomposition of the astronaut's body in one spot - and its recreation, atom
for atom in another (teleportation).

Even if the artist fails to do so but succeeds in calling forth any kind of
emotional response in his viewers/readers/listeners, he is deemed
successful.

Every artist has a reference group, his audience. They could be alive or
dead (for instance, he could measure himself against past artists). They
could be few or many, but they must exist for art, in its fullest sense, to
exist. Modern theories of art speak about the audience as an integral and
defining part of the artistic creation and even of the artefact itself.

But this, precisely, is the source of the dilemma of the artist:

Who is to determine who is a good, qualitative artist and who is not?

Put differently, who is to measure the distance between the original
experience and its representation?

After all, if the original experience is an element of an idiosyncratic,
non-communicable, language - we have no access to any information regarding
it and, therefore, we are in no position to judge it. Only the artist has
access to it and only he can decide how far is his representation from his
original experience. Art criticism is impossible.

Granted, his reference group (his audience, however limited, whether among
the living, or among the dead) has access to that meta language, that
universal dictionary available to all humans. But this is already a long way
towards the representation (the work of art). No one in the audience has
access to the original experience and their capacity to pass judgement is,
therefore, in great doubt.

On the other hand, only the reference group, only the audience can aptly
judge the representation for what it is. The artist is too emotionally
involved. True, the cold, objective facts concerning the work of art are
available to both artist and reference group - but the audience is in a
privileged status, its bias is less pronounced.

Normally, the reference group will use the meta language embedded in us as
humans, some empathy, some vague comparisons of emotions to try and grasp
the emotional foundation laid by the artist. But this is very much like
substituting verbal intercourse for the real thing. Talking about emotions -
let alone making assumptions about what the artist may have felt that we
also, maybe, share - is a far cry from what really transpired in the
artist's mind.

We are faced with a dichotomy:

The epistemological elements in the artistic process belong exclusively and
incommunicably to the artist.

The ontological aspects of the artistic process belong largely to the group
of reference but they have no access to the epistemological domain.

And the work of art can be judged only by comparing the epistemological to
the ontological.

Nor the artist, neither his group of reference can do it. This mission is
nigh impossible.

Thus, an artist must make a decision early on in his career:

Should he remain loyal and close to his emotional experiences and studies
and forgo the warmth and comfort of being reassured and directed from the
outside, through the reactions of the reference group, or should he consider
the views, criticism and advice of the reference group in his artistic
creation - and, most probably, have to compromise the quality and the
intensity of his original emotion in order to be more communicative.

I wish to thank my brother, Sharon Vaknin, a gifted painter and illustrator,
for raising these issues.

ADDENDUM - Art as Self-Mutilation

The internalized anger of Jesus - leading to his suicidal pattern of
behaviour - pertained to all of Mankind. His sacrifice "benefited" humanity
as a whole. A self-mutilator, in comparison, appears to be "selfish".

His anger is autistic, self-contained, self-referential and, therefore,
"meaningless" as far as we are concerned. His catharsis is a private
language.

But what people fail to understand is that art itself is an act of self
mutilation, the etching of ephemeral pain into a lasting medium, the
ultimate private language.

They also ignore, at their peril, the fact that only a very thin line
separates self-mutilation - whether altruistic (Jesus) or "egoistic" - and
the mutilation of others (serial killers, Hitler).

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self
Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East.
He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI)
Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central
East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of
Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com