Dissanayake Summary (Detailed)

Ellen Dissanayake, "What is Art For?"
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.

Source of cover graphic: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0295970170.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Ellen Dissanayake, "Homo Aestheticus"
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 1 Nov, 2003 Modified: 30 Nov, 2003
Where Art Comes From and Why
The Free Press
New York
1992

Source of cover graphic: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0295974796.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Key ideas in the two books?
(Al Selvin)

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Both the making and receiving of art is a fundamental, universal human behavior, present in all cultures at all times
(Al Selvin)

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the "behavior of art" as "inextricably intertwined with other intrinsic propensities that characterize developing and present human nature" (p 108)
(Al Selvin)

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Art: "...whose versatile garment shows, under the embroidery and ornaments of its many uses, the multicolored threads and filaments of its primordial substance, The elements of art are human nature's fundamental elements." (p 112)
(Al Selvin)

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Elements of art
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 26 Nov, 2003 Modified: 29 Nov, 2003
- Making and use of tools
- Need for order
- Language and speech
- Classification and concept formation
- Symbolization
- Self-consciousness
- The creating and using of culture
- Sociality
- Complexity of affect
- Need for novelty
- Adaptability
- Making special

(pp 112-126)

Humans' innate capability for art, myth, symbolism
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 29 Nov, 2003
"A generation ago, without reference to "cognitive universals," structural linguists, cognitive scientists, cultural anthropologists, and literary critics proposed the existence of universal mental "structures" or principles from which such fundamental human abilities as language, thought, narrative or story, and myth are generated. In such schemes it was claimed, for example, that all humans have a similar innate aptitude for creating, recognizing,. and responding to such components of myth as symmetry, inversion, equivalence, homology, congruence, and identity and union (Levi-Strauss 1963, 1964-68). Literary structures all over the world make use of techniques for relating elements of the story, techniques that are variations (or violations) of the binary system: such things as contrast, polarity, difference, repetition. parallelism, successiveness, concatenation, counterpoise, juxtaposition, and progression." (p 190)

Claude Levi-Strauss, 1963: Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.
____________. 1964-68. Mythologiques. 3 vols. Paris: Plon.

Her conclusion: "Art is a normal and necessary behavior of human beings that like other common and universal human occupations and preoccupations such as talking, working, exercising, playing, socializing, learning, loving, and caring should be recognized, encouraged, and developed in everyone." (p 225)
(Al Selvin)

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Sub-ideas?
(Al Selvin)

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To understand art today, it is necessary to understand why, what, and how human beings have practiced art for not just the last 500 or 2000 years, but the last 100,000 to 4 million
(Al Selvin)

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(Al Selvin)

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"Our mentality and metabolism, our fears and longings, needs, satisfactions, and dreams are much more those of our earlier ancestors [pre-10,000 years ago] than of village or city dwellers." (p 109)
(Al Selvin)

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"Until recent times.. the arts have been handmaidens to other selectively valuable activities." (p 104-5)
(Al Selvin)

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"Ultimately we should recognize ourselves as Homo aestheticus, underneath the crust of superfluous excrescences slapped onto us by the modern and postmodern way of life." (p 193)
(Al Selvin)

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She advocates not even using the word "art" because it's too freighted with recent connotations
(Al Selvin)

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"independent, autonomous, aesthetic creation and response are evolutionarily superfluous residue from the activities and feelings that originally accompanied and reinforced selectively valuable ritual ceremonies and other social behavior" (p 156)
(Al Selvin)

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Art can (and should) be understood in evolutionary and ethological terms with a "species-centric" perspective
(Al Selvin)

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Art is as much a need as other human needs
(Al Selvin)

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"you can take the species out of the evolutionary milieu, but you can't take the evolutionary milieu out of the species"
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 17 Nov, 2003 Modified: 17 Nov, 2003
""What this means is that the customary accepted philosophical and historical views of human existence and their answers to questions about human nature are pitifully (and literally) superficial."

(p 4)

"The radical position I offer here as a species-centered view of art is that it is not art (with all its burden of accreted connotations from the past two centuries) but making special that has been evolutionarily or socially and culturally important. That is to say, until recent times in the West, what has been of social, cultural, and individual evolutionary importance in any art of "work of art" has been its making something special that is important to the species, society, or culture." (p 56)
(Al Selvin)

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Her argument is that, evolutionarily speaking, art is a key "enabling mechanism" -- an "evolutionary means to promote selectively valuable behavior (in this case, ceremonial ritual)" (p 156)
(Al Selvin)

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The way we experience art, even today, is "older" and more tied to basic human behavior than we realize
(Al Selvin)

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inherent, interrelated proclivities: "tendencies to recognize an extra-ordinary as opposed to an ordinary dimension of experience; to act deliberately in response to uncertainty rather than to follow instinctive programs of fight, flight, or freeze in place; to make important things (such as tools, weapons, and transitions) special by transforming them from ordinary to extraordinary, often in ritual ceremonies; and to have the capacity to experience a transformative or self-transcendent emotional state." (p 71)
(Al Selvin)

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"Much of our emotional responses to metaphors, to analogies, to the spatiotemporal structures of the arts, would appear to hark back to their preverbal, presymbolic, preanalytic modal/vectoral origins... What we are conscious of, what we intellectually discern of our experience of the arts, takes place only at the point from which the water wells out. Its sources and unique flavors come from forgotten commingling subterranean streams that have traveled through residues of rocky deposits far away, in our own prelinguistic prehistory." (p 184)
(Al Selvin)

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What is/has been the "survival value" of art? Why has it been selected for in evolutionary terms?
(Al Selvin)

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Making things important to the survival of the community/culture special, enhancing their value, making them stand out and resonate
(Al Selvin)

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"making special was often inseparable from and intrinsically necessary to the control of the material conditions of subsistence that allowed humans to survive." (p 92)
(Al Selvin)

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"...along with gaining better control of the means of subsistence by the use of material technology, humans took an additional remarkable and unprecedented evolutionary step. They gilded the lily, making sure that their technology "worked' by deliberately reinforcing it with emotionally satisfying special elaborations and shaping..... the "means of enhancement" or "means of refinement" ... is equally impressive and equally deeply engrained in human nature" [as language and technological means of production] (p 95)
(Al Selvin)

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"making special (as, say, embellishing, repeating, or performing a particular act with virtuosity) might well have originated as a demonstration of the wish or need to persuade others (and oneself) of the efficacy or desirability of what was being done. Taking pains is a way of being more certain to achieve one's intention. Taking something seriously (that deserves to be taken seriously) is likely to ensure its being carried through... the fact of one's taking pains convinces others and oneself that the activity is worth doing; it is reinforcing." (p 104)
(Al Selvin)

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Tags:key idea

"Common beliefs and customs bind individuals together; congruence of minds and deeds is essential to the continuance of a small group of mutually dependent, relatively helpless creatures... in an insecure and violent world." (p 111)
(Al Selvin)

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Art as a behavior is closely tied to other universal behaviors such as play and ritual
(Al Selvin)

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(Al Selvin)

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"The arts enabled ceremonies because they made ceremonies feel good. Before they were ever consciously used to make things special, the satisfactions of rhythm, novelty, order, pattern, color, bodily movement, and moving in synchrony with others were fundamental animal pleasures, essential ingredients of life. Using these bodily pleasurable elements to make ceremonies special -- elaborating and shaping them -- the arts, and art, were born." (p 60)
(Al Selvin)

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Play and ritual
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 26 Nov, 2003 Modified: 26 Nov, 2003
?Both are highly social. Both make more than usual use of tension and release, out-of-context behavior, surprise ? the manipulation of expectancy and anticipation. Both make more than usual use of the qualities of repetition, exaggeration, imitation, and elaboration. Play is much more concerned with change and novelty, spontaneity and unpredictability that ritual is. Ritual generally tends towards stereotyped, prescribed, and even inflexible activities, but it does take place in a festive or unusual atmosphere that contrasts markedly with the routine of everyday life. Most important, ritual, like play, is concerned with metaphor in that it is saturated with symbolism, the creation of another world in which once ordinary things acquire the potency of standing for extraordinary things. In this world, ordinarily incompatible things may be combined or reconciled into unprecedented and convincing unity.? (p 89)

Characteristics of play: sociability, inventiveness, imitative learning, imitative behavior, curiosity, exploration (p 111)
(Al Selvin)

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Key idea -- role of metaphor and symbolism in both ritual and play
(Al Selvin)

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"it has been only a very short time, speaking in evolutionary terms, that art has been detached from its antecedents and affiliates, ritual and play, so that its varied components have coalesced to become an independent activity." (p 162)
(Al Selvin)

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"Ritual ceremonies... may provide an "escape valve" -- overt or covert -- for the temporary expression or satisfaction of illicit cravings, of perverse and prohibited wishes." (p 139)
(Al Selvin)

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"Mircea Eliade (1964, 508-11) suggests that one of the universal sources of poetry was shamanistic euphoria: "In preparing his trance, the shaman drums, summons his spirit helpers, speaks a 'secret language,' or the 'animal language,' imitating the cries of beasts and especially the songs of birds. He ends by obtaining a 'second state' that provides the impetus for linguistic creation and the rhythms of lyric poetry... Poetry remakes and prolongs language." (p 114)
(Al Selvin)

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"We may forget that the formalizations inherent in ritual ceremonies have provided important occasions during which humans throughout their history have experienced the arts, which themselves were emotionally saturated integral reinforcers of important communal beliefs and truths." (p 139)
(Al Selvin)

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The best definition of "art" is "making special"
(Al Selvin)

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"...making special, apart from perceiving or solving problems [as creativity/innovation is usually assigned to], takes ordinary things and makes them more than ordinary, heightens their emotional affect, or -- to say the same thing -- uses sensual/emotional ways of drawing attention to them, thereby emphasizing their importance and significance or making them alternatively or additionally real. " (p 97-98)
(Al Selvin)

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Performing any action on an object beyond what is called for in the interest of "utility" is what constitutes 'making special'
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 8 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
"mere making or creating is neither making special nor art. A chipped stone tool is simply that, unless it is somehow made special or worked so that an embedded fossil is displayed to advantage.... as soon as the [object] is fluted, or painted, or otherwise handled using considerations apart from its utility, its maker is displaying artistic behavior (or ritual, or play; ...the distinction may be unclear or unnecessary)" (p 99)

Literacy, and modernity in general, have done more to separate and abstract us from our fundamental nature than we realize or acknowledge, so that along with the benefits are heavy costs and losses
(Al Selvin)

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Taking an evolutionary perspective on art gets us out of many of the binds of postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.
(Al Selvin)

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Not my area of direct interest, so won't pursue this much
(Al Selvin)

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(Al Selvin)

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"in traditional societies actions, beliefs, customs and values seem to refer to, complement, and complete each other. ... aesthetically attractive, possessing a purity and unself-conscious harmony that our lives appear to lack." (p 169)
(Al Selvin)

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"To the nonliterate, the notion of boredom has little meaning; existence itself demands neither justification not cultivation. Of nothing is distracting it, the mind finds occupation in its inner life or directly in the surroundings. The immediate world is more likely to be noticed -- colors, smells, sounds, appearances of things, as well as their relationships to each other and to the mental and imaginative life." (p 176)
(Al Selvin)

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" ....what the arts were for, an embodiment and reinforcement of socially shared significances, is what we crave and are perishing for today." (p 200)
(Al Selvin)

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"Much more than ourselves, preliterate people have conceivably been sensitized to apprehend and respond to many kinds of information that are never verbalized but only expressed in action ... in rituals, emotional gestures, and so forth." (p 177)
(Al Selvin)

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What's been lost
(Al Selvin)

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Key themes w/r/t knowledge art and Compendium that emerge or are reinforced for me in this reading?
(Al Selvin)

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[A] Compendium itself can be thought of as art
(Al Selvin)

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It isn't inherently "art", but in the heightened moments, or in particular practices of it, it can be
(Al Selvin)

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Facets of this idea?
(Al Selvin)

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Compendium itself as an art medium
(Al Selvin)

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(Al Selvin)

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"Insofar as we respond aesthetically we are aware (at some level; it may well be inarticulate) of the code -- of how not only that something is said. This awareness, which is cognitive, makes our fuller response possible, as we discriminate, relate, recognize, and otherwise follow the code's manipulations." (p 165)
(Al Selvin)

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"To respond aesthetically to an artwork one must be familiar with the code that stands behind it, which tacitly establishes its limits."
(Al Selvin)

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Specialness , intent, deliberateness
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 26 Nov, 2003 Modified: 29 Nov, 2003
"In whatever we are accustomed to call art, a specialness is tacitly or overtly acknowledged. Reality, or what is considered to be reality, is elaborated, reformed, given not only particularity (emphasis on uniqueness, or "specialness") but import (value, or "specialness") -- what may be called such things as magic or beauty or spiritual power or significance.

Making special implies intent or deliberateness. When shaping or giving artistic expression to an idea, or embellishing an object, or recognizing that an idea or object is artistic, one gives (or acknowledges) a specialness that without one?s activity or regard would not exist. Moreover, one intends by making special to place the activity or artifact in a "realm" different from the everyday. " (p 92)

"it is... much better to think of the arts as "fundamentally" emotional and sensual as well as cognitive ... experiences are at the same time perceptual, ideational, and emotional... symbols too are no less emotional than cognitive." [cites spectrum from bodily/emotional to normative/ideational in Ndembu ritual symbols] (p 88)
(Al Selvin)

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In Compendium, nodes 'n links can serve this spectrum of experiences
(Al Selvin)

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" ... the concentration of a community's vital concerns in a compelling and socially shared symbolic object or event." (p 118)
(Al Selvin)

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A goal of C practice
(Al Selvin)

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"The numerous ends that violent behavior seems to serve -- release, communication, play, self-affirmation, self-defense, self-discovery, self-destruction, flight from reality, assertion of "truest sanity" in a particular situation (Fraser 1974:9) -- are very like the motivations that are often proposed to underlie art." (p 139) .. "a valued sense of intensified reality" (p 140)
(Al Selvin)

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"Theorists of a psychoanalytic bent are emphatic about the importance of what is called "primary process thinking" and its influence in all conscious life. Their approach assumes that there is a psychological necessity for keeping ideas in a partly understood form, resisting too clear recognizability (Bott, 1972:280-82). Anton Ehrenzweig (1967) goes as far as to claim that what we respond to in art is essentially the logically incoherent and ambiguous "hidden" meaning behind the formal structure." (p 148)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 11 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
Bott, Elizabeth. 1972. "Reply to Edmund Leach's Article," in J. S. LaFontaine, ed., The Interpretation of Ritual, pp 277-82. London: Tavistock Publications. Ltd.

Anton Ehrenzweig, 1967. The Hidden Order of Art.. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Relation to music?
(Al Selvin)

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"Music does seem indisputably "natural" in its powerful, preverbal, physical effects.... it is heard in the body -- as an inner experience constituted in the body. It also has the power move us "transcendentally." Viktor Zuckerkandl (1973, 51) has remarked that music provides "the shortest, least arduous, perhaps even the most natural solvent of artificial boundaries between the self and others." ... By means of music a supra individual state is created in which singer and listener can exit together, joined in a "common consciousness," a common pattern of thought, attitude, and emotion (Booth 1981)."
(Al Selvin)

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[re written music]: While this rigid adherence to a fixed score certainly has limited spontaneity and restricts the individual performer's liberty, it must be said that the ability to compose and reproduce music on paper has allowed a kind of complex aesthetic exploration and experience that was not known before. The possibilities for development of melodic themes, harmonic combinations, and voicing among instruments were expanded tremendously with writing and printing -- for the composer who could work and rework them, for the conductor and performers who could practice and rehearse them, and for the audience that could study and hear and reexperience them. This has led to a profundity of expression (achieved through form -- exposition, development, and recapitulation over time, manipulation and control of a complex diversity of elements)..." (p 134-5)
(Al Selvin)

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Quoting Leonard Bernstein: "A piece of music is a constant metamorphosis of given material, involving such transformational operations as inversion, argumentation, retrograde, diminution, modulation, the opposition of consonance and dissonance, the various forms of imitation... the varieties of rhythm and meter, harmonic progressions, coloristic and dynamic changes, plus the infinite interactions of all these with one another. These are the meanings of music." (p 192)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
[Leonard Bernstein, 1976: The Unanswered Question. Cambridge: Harvard University Press]

The manipulations of the formal elements can themselves "be" and "create" the meaning
(Al Selvin)

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Compendium practitioner as an artist
(Al Selvin)

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Related quotations?
(Al Selvin)

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Role of artist?
(Al Selvin)

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Making an "artificial" way of talking instead of "natural" can make it more comprehensible
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 22 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
"Hence, using Freudian vocabulary, what I described ... as the inherent "aesthetics of control" -- geometric shape, rhythm, pattern, --- can be viewed as impositions of the secondary process or cultural artificiality on nature: ways of making nature comprehensible by making it special (unnatural)."
(p 107)

Competencies/skills of artist?
(Al Selvin)

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"Techne: "having a correct understanding of the principles involved" (from the Greek) (p 195)
(Al Selvin)

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Excellence and skill of artistic practitioners
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 2 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
" "Completeness" (implying thoroughness, accuracy, and diligence) and "appropriateness" are important Yoruba criteria of aesthetic excellence (Drewal and Drewal, 1983). Certainly many if not most societies value skill in execution of objects or performances, and skill embraces such characteristics as suitability for function (so that a mask that does not fit the face well is not a good mask), intricacy of elaboration, endurance, and virtuosity, And recognition of what is appropriate or fit for a particular object or occasion is equally widespread and critical in aesthetic evaluation (e.g. Strathern and Strathern, 1971; Drewal and Drewal, 1983)." (p 50)

Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. 1983. Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Strathern, Andrew, and Marilyn Strathern. 1971. Self-Decoration on Mount Hagen. London: Blackworth.

Motivation of artist?
(Al Selvin)

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"Over and above the requirement to take note of experience that is perceived as having structure and shape is a tendency to see order for its own sake, to find delight and satisfaction whenever it is recognized, and to actively seek or long to impose it ourselves." (p 114)
(Al Selvin)

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"making special .. is used to articulate substantive and vital concerns, it is drawn from , expresses, and engages one's deepest and strongest feelings." (p 53)
(Al Selvin)

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"Working to make special... implies the intention of doing one's best, and taking pains will result in considered work that embodies the most highly regarded attainment and aspirations of the society." (p 163)
(Al Selvin)

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"...just as all symbols are not art, neither is all art symbolic. Making special, shaping, embellishing, repeating, and elaborating are gratifying in themselves, even though representational meaning be secondary or even absent." (p 91)
(Al Selvin)

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Social position of artist?
(Al Selvin)

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A kind of apartness in the role of the artist; behaviors
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 2 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
"In a number of societies one can identify a kind of apartness in the role of the artist ... he may observe taboos before and while working; he may feel the urge to carve suddenly come upon him; he may acknowledge a special relationship with a tutelary power. Also musicians may display the abstracted seriousness of any professional performer and remain aloof before and during a performance. Where artists are often considered to be in close contact with the supernatural, a vessel for the divine spirit, they may feel a strong sense of self-importance or humility." (p 48-49)

"Insofar as he or she has access to this special realm, the artist -- as indeed is frequent in primitive societies -- may be looked upon with suspicion, fear, or awe." (p 94-95)
(Al Selvin)

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[B] The idea/intuition I've had that my practitioner experience feels like something quite "old"
(Al Selvin)

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That's it's best understood in the context of an old/ancient human phenomenon, not as an emerging thing in the light of modern culture and new technology, or at least that a full understanding does require this
(Al Selvin)

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Related quotations/ideas?
(Al Selvin)

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"the loss of a particular cultural behavior does not mean it is necessarily gone forever. It remains as part of the potential reservoir of the species, and may variously reemerge whenever external circumstances and the dominant dynamic of social interaction change, warranting other options." (p 120)
(Al Selvin)

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The feeling that Compendium is, or at least contains, something that has been there all along and is now reemerging...
(Al Selvin)

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Diss characterizes the arts as "a universal inherited propensity in human nature to make some objects and activities special" (p 107)
(Al Selvin)

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"In the quasi-spiritual connotations of capital-A Art, it is as of there is sort of archetypal group memory of what the arts did for us. Ironically, we pay homage to the concept in a way that would be incomprehensible to people for whom art -- like religion, economics, education, magic, and sex -- is an integral, inseparable part of life and for whom the arts still shape and embody its verities. Intimation of what art was for still cling to it, and the sacredness art helped to transmit now seems to be projected onto the empty vehicle itself." (p 168)
(Al Selvin)

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"The ability to visualize in a lump of rock a still-unformed shape and to anticipate what its use might be (or, having an aim in mind, to anticipate a means of achieving it)." (p 113)
(Al Selvin)

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It has felt like recovering, or uncovering, an old skill
(Al Selvin)

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[C] There are dimensions of "play" and "ritual" that are important to the understanding of Compendium/knowledge art
(Al Selvin)

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Related quotations/ideas?
(Al Selvin)

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"There is no need to decide whether a theater or concert performance is "play," "ritual", or "art." The three often interpenetrate, since "metareality" and "specialness" generally presupposes the freedom, unpredictability, make-believe, imagination, and delight that are associates with play (and art), or the formality, stylization, elaboration, and entrancement that characterize ritual (and art)." (p 56-57)
(Al Selvin)

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"Just as human rituals are performed in a place that is temporally and spatially marked off from routine, everyday life (Kapferer, 1983:2), so it is characteristic of human ritual ceremony that objects or words taken out of their everyday context may acquire a potency not ordinarily evident. Metaphorical and symbolic uses of words and objects are the essence of ritual." (p 84)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 26 Nov, 2003 Modified: 26 Nov, 2003
Kapferer, Bruce. 1983. A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing In Sri Lanka. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Potency of objects/words
(Al Selvin)

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Density of ritual symbols: "The simple and unequivocal ritualized signal is, in human ceremonies, replaced by a ritual symbol that may be saturated with allusive significance. Such symbolic condensation or concentration can serve to unite in one graspable whole a complex store of information about cultural and natural processes that would be too vast to remember separately and individually." (p 85)
(Al Selvin)

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"Where ecstatic rituals are performed, it is said, the ritual experience helps individuals endure otherwise intolerable pressures by lightening their force, suggesting that they are being controlled and coped with (Lewis, 1971: 204-5)." (p 155)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
Lewis, J. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. London: Penguin.

[E] Being a "knowledge artist" is not a matter of highlighting personal/individual expertise, should not be understood in the 2004 context of art as something specialist/experts do in the context of the artworld, art galleries, "language games" etc.
(Al Selvin)

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Related quotations?
(Al Selvin)

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"We moderns feel "art" to be a private compulsion, a personal desire to mold or make something out of one's individual experience. But art actually originated and thrived for most of human history as a communal activity: in the smaller and more inter-dependent and like-minded societies in which humans evolved, the need to make sense of experience was satisfied in communally valued and validated activities." (p 61)
(Al Selvin)

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"Expression and satisfaction of the longing for transcendence is, if anything can be so described, for humans "the meaning of life." " (p 144)
(Al Selvin)

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[D] There is the possibility of a transformational practice (using elements/techniques we're not already using, or are underutilizing)
(Al Selvin)

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Related quotations/ideas?
(Al Selvin)

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Compendium: a spoken and pictographic language for the postliterate age
(Al Selvin)

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Contrast of oral and literate cultures
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
"despite the artificiality of the poles of the oral-literate continuum, certain intriguing oppositions and comparisons can be made. Oral communication is, first of all, personal and involved. Speaker and listener must be face to face or at least in each other's vicinity, allowing for a shared experience. Common knowledge and expectations can be assumed, so that much can be taken for granted. A lot can be left out, and if the hearer is confused she or he can ask for clarification. Written language, by contrast, is impersonal and detached. Writers cannot presume shared knowledge, so they must be explicit where a speaker is implicit; precise and careful where a speaker can be careless; streamlined and sparse where a speaker can be redundant. Written language is primarily technical, concerned with logical and coherent explication or argument. Spoken language is vivid, idiomatic, and at last as concerned with facilitating a social encounter as with accurately and unequivocally conveying an informative message." (p 205)

Benefits of rituals
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 26 Nov, 2003 Modified: 29 Nov, 2003
"Rituals.. promote smooth social functioning in a number of ways: by uniting or binding the participants in common beliefs and values by reiterating them, thus explaining the world and providing a sense of meaning. Rituals integrate collective bodily feelings and emotions with the requirements of collective social life. Rituals regularize relationships, as in rites of passage. They convert the arbitrary into the necessary, thus certifying practices and dogmas that are of vital interest to the group. They may dissipate painful ideas and obsessive fears, by allowing them to be "acted out" in a formalized way. ... [they] also efficiently and memorably transmit important information. The repetition, the symbolic condensation, the emotional heightening, the use of all the senses -- all aid memorization of the "tribal encyclopedia" (Havelock, 1963; Pfeiffer, 1977, 1982). (p 87)

Havelock, Eric. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap.

Pfeiffer, John. 1977. The Emergence Of Society. New York: McGraw-Hill.
___________. 1982. The Creative Explosion. New York: Harber & Row.

"Whereas ritual reinforces established communal beliefs and practices, art says something new and individual. For us, ritual -- though it may in some instances evoke comfortable or even heightened emotion -- is most often considered to be repetitive, predictable, and somewhat sterile. Through art, on the other hand, we are introduced to a wider world, often the unique interpretation of another in which we gain a sense of new knowledge and possibilities." (p 80)
(Al Selvin)

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-- the goal is to evoke "poetic knowledge"
(Al Selvin)

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" "poetic knowledge" -- ideas without exact reference which nevertheless have a compelling force of truth... those in modern society who find this kind of thought natural may be more receptive to art and more apt to be artists themselves." (p 179)
(Al Selvin)

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"Any poem, oral or written, is set apart from ordinary speech in many ways: the mood and manner of its delivery (which is usually more serious or portentous); the context and setting of its performance (in a public place before an audience or in a quiet place apart from mundane sources of interruption); the behavior of its audience (receptive, respectful, prepared to be moved); and certainly stylistic and prosodic features." (p 114)
(Al Selvin)

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"the cultural control of nature (the human body and its ordinary movements) that is "dance" seems to lead to a focused and felt awareness of human presence in the world. Dance enables that interpenetration of self and activity to be felt as "something much stronger" in Sparshott's words, than we are accustomed to feel in more instrumental activities... in our ordinary day-to-day existence. " (p 123)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
Sparshott, Francis, 1988. Off the ground: First steps to a philosophical consideration of the dance. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

"Music is a memory bank for finding one's way around the world." (p 178)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 29 Nov, 2003 Modified: 29 Nov, 2003
Bruce Chatwin, 1987. The Songlines. New York: Viking. p108

"As the vehicle for group meaning and a galvanizer of group one-heartedness, art-conjoined-with-ritual is essential to group survival; in traditional societies "art for life's sake," not "art for art's sake," is the rule. (p 222)
(Al Selvin)

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"Play, by providing a "no risk" arena where innovative behavior can be tried and mastered, may facilitate in all children -- not just emotionally disturbed or handicapped ones -- new, creative behavior." (p 78)
(Al Selvin)

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So a Compendium practice that more explicitly incorporate elements of play could foster the innovative behavior of trying out new combinations of ideas, new relationships
(Al Selvin)

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"In performances of every kind... including shamanism, exorcisms, dance, ritual, theater, and even psychoanalysis -- "strips of behavior" are taken out of their natural context and used as "material" for the reconstructed whole. Life provides the material that performers -- through their art of shaping, rearranging, controlling, interpreting, elaborating ... reconstitute and restore back to life in the performance." (p 128)
(Al Selvin)

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Entered: 23 Nov, 2003 Modified: 23 Nov, 2003
[Shechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology, Phila: U of Penn Press]

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