An Ecosystem of Effects.

Let us posit a simplification, which will hopefully seem less arbitrary and less reductive as we further describe it. The simplification is this: that the two poles of concern, when it comes to what we call “art,” are the production of pleasure and the production of models. This is a bit what Gabriel Duquette has touched upon in calling “maps” and “chords” the building blocks of a work. The maps are compressions of reality—models which instruct and improve us—while the chords are sensorially harmonious formalisms.

What we might notice about this provisionally useful, if metaphysically false, dichotomy is that it mirrors much of man’s thinking more broadly. We speak of food as balancing two fundamental considerations, flavor and nutrition, and take up advocacy somewhere along the spectrum depending on our temperaments, our surrender to hedonism, and our strength of health. We divide our days—organizationally and psychologically—into two parts: work and play, labor and leisure. We imagine a “lower,” seductive, devilish presence on one shoulder which whispers desire, and a “higher” angel which counsels responsibility.

That is, in our thinking there seems to be a structural schism between short-term and long-term consideration. In northern Protestant cultures, where the winters are harsh, an inclination towards grim resignation and productivity dominates; while southern Catholic cultures take on a greater lightness and laxity. Future-discounting is a primordial bias, born of drifted contexts and shorter lifespans. All successful societies battle it, but to varying degrees. And since the long-term orientation inclines a society toward intergenerational success, its structural dichotomy with short-termism correlates with a dichotomy between cooperation and defection. Future-discounting—the short-selling of some future self, in favor of today’s—is merely the temporal equivalent of the normally spatial defection. (Whether we conceive of that future self as our offspring or merely ourselves tomorrow—the self reborn upon waking from sleep.)

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By pleasure, I mean any attendant effect which, in the act itself of experiencing the work, we find desirable or compelling. By model, I mean any desired effect which sits more distant on the horizon. I mean (for instance) the moods—something between objective environment and affective response—which permeate our experience of both art and life. I mean (for instance) the narrative tempos which help us pace our complementary lifeworlds, lending a shared sense of rhythm. I mean those shared markers, metaphors, and mechanisms which allow us to coordinate. I mean the tactics and strategies, the orientations and identities (what we might call “stratagem-composites”) of fictional characters, which as readers we compare against our own lives, and against the outcomes which karmically befall them. I mean the grammar of interaction revealed by an Austen novel; I mean the grammar of Greek society as revealed to us by Homer; either of which we compare to our own experienced grammars. I mean the way in which monuments and memorials convey situate us historically and instill in us the values of our culture. I mean all that which (claims to) help us understand ourselves.¹

Fortunately, for those who wish to eat cake while cutting calories, pleasure and modeling are not strictly opposed but practically and evolutionarily intertwined, one feeding back on the other. It is the apprehension of fit which gives us pleasure. It is the promise of pleasure which entices our excursions into arts unknown, and it is pleasure which lauds our finding there of insight, our recompressions and re-apprehensions of the world. Enlightening rays warm us like a sun. The epiphanic moment is frequently itself an ecstatic moment. We understand that joyous news is only ever a promise, and our joy only ever expectation. And we should expect that Pareto frontiers of increasing conversion rates and plummeting trade-off efficiencies will attend any balancing of the short-term and far-.

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Just as there is an ecosystem of pleasures, from the sensual and bodily to the conceptual and narrative, there is also an ecosystem of modeling effects, and it is only within this ecosystem that a given effect may living flourish, and we err by privileging as ultimate and sufficient a genre of effect which is only ever contingently necessary. As within all ecosystems, it is the frequencies of strategies, in proportion to each other, which constitute a working equilibrium.

In the past I have, regrettably, implied that art, or capital-A Art, has been the province of a narrow set of effects: novelty, surprise, defamiliarization, formal experimentation. This may be an accurate sociological description of cultural thought in the 20th century, but it merely repeats that culture’s provincialism. There is no purpose to an avant-garde unless there is a much larger infantry unit, moving behind it; and a well-balanced army counts cavalry and heavy artillery in its ranks, and an engineering corps to build pontoon bridges, fill sandbags, or rig demolitions. The consolidation of an avant-garde’s discoveries—the assessment and cross-examination of reports; the steady amalgamation of intelligence into overarching strategy—is as critical as the avant-garde, is indeed the only basis by which the avant-garde’s work is worthwhile. A society of experimenters, without those entrepreneurs who stabilize and scale the production of ephemeral effects, is an evolutionary dead end. The proclamation of avant work as the only “true” art—a propaganda written by early avant artists, and repeated a century later by cognitive scientists—is best understood as a successful bid to reroute flows of symbolic capital away from certain participants in the ecology and towards others (namely, those producing the propaganda, and those who find some personal or class benefit in the wider acceptance of it).

1. In a sense, I am merely reiterating the Gricean maxims, which are themselves a reiteration of American Pragmatist doctrine. We expect of all communication (lest we would not heed or mind it) that it is somehow useful to us. We are working through necessary, and not sufficient, conditions for art; an adequate definition would take notice of historical contingency, the sociological motivators of lexicographical drift, and a study of the concrete traditions of media which have always tethered arts’ lofty abstract claims. ↩︎