John Dewey's Art As Experience (11 of 15)

All right, so welcome to this video. This is number 11. Wow, what a series here. So we've got at least two or three more videos to go before we finish Dewey up. And in this video, we're going to wrap up what little we have left of chapter seven on the natural history of form. And we're gonna cover primarily, the focus will be the next chapter, chapter eight, titled The Organization of Energies. And again, for my students from the University of Houston, who are watching this, this is another one of those videos that is fully optional. You don't need to watch this to really to understand Dewey. But as always, I recommend watching it for a fuller understanding, and especially if you're gonna be writing one of your essays on Dewey. So without further ado, here we go. I read this quote in the last lecture at the very end of the video, but I'm gonna pick up where we left off and repeat this quote, because it segues really nicely into this next slide, which is a much, kind of a wieldy, weldy quote. But this is gonna set us up for that. So let's go ahead and read this real quick. We've been talking about form in the last couple lectures, right? Dewey's concept of form and how that applies to aesthetic experience, right? Has a lot to do with unity, the integration of parts, how shape is used and how it is organized. Also, there's gonna be skill, perhaps, could be involved, costliness. All of these are elements of form. And rhythm is no exception, right? For Dewey, rhythm is also a characteristic of form. It's not something superimposed and artificial to art, but springs from the very nature of aesthetic experience. So again, let's read this first quote, and let's get ourselves started, kind of wrap up this chapter, and then we'll get into this next one. So the first characteristic of the environing world that makes possible the existence of artistic form is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture, and music exist. Were it not so, rhythm, as an essential property of form, would be merely superimposed upon material, not an operation through which material affects its own culmination in experience. You know, at first glance, I might be thinking of the Dionysian in Nietzsche. You know how Nietzsche talks about all art is sort of response to that underlying Dionysian urge in all of us, that sort of emotional, irrational urge to sort of expel our desires and our impulses, right? And there's a lot of that in Dewey, but here, I don't think that's what he's talking about. He's talking about a very sort of biological, geographical, scientific, I think, notion of rhythm, right, based on experience, of course, but I think he's thinking of this more in terms of, you know, the environing world, you know, in other words, the environment and things like that. So let's look at this next quote, and he's gonna kind of, I think, make it a little bit more clear that that's what he's talking about. Whoop, we backed up a bit. So sooner or later, the participation of man in nature's rhythms, a partnership much more intimate than is any observation of them for purposes of knowledge, induced him to impose rhythm on changes where they did not appear. Okay, so we talked about this before, right? So, you know, art is born in and from nature. I think this is the third or fourth video. We were talking about this towards the end of his chapter. I think it was on chapter on having an experience. But anyway, you know, we see these rhythms, these patterns in nature, and originally we can only respond to them, okay? But this partnership becomes even more intimate, right, as we impose changes where they did not appear. In other words, we learn how to utilize some of the causes and effects that we observe in our experience of nature. He goes on, the apportioned wreath, the stretched string, the taut skin, rendered the measures of action conscious through song and dance. Again, I find this curious. He seems to mention in these kind of passages where he's talking about the germ of art and the germ of creation, it seems like music is one of the first things he mentions. Again, I'm reminded of Nietzsche here. Experiences of war, of hunt, of sowing and reaping, of the death and resurrection of vegetation, of stars circling over watchful shepherds, of constant return and inconstant moon were undergone, these were all undergone, to be reproduced in pantomime and generated the sense of life as drama. So this is the kind of rhythm he's talking about in nature, right, these sort of cyclical changes, war, the hunt, all of these are rhythmic in a certain sense. In the case of animal life, the mysterious movements of serpent, elk, boar fell into rhythms that brought the very essence of the lives of these animals to realization as they were enacted in dance, chiseled in stone, wrought in silver, or limbed on the walls of caves. Yeah, I like this passage, and I mean, I'm not going to give too much crap for this, but do you really think that animals and watching animals move was what was the invention of dance? Maybe, I mean, certain dance moves are modeled after animals, and I know martial arts, similar, right? You got kung fu where they've got, you know, certain moves modeling up, you know, the dragon, the crane, all this sort of thing. But to me, I mean, I guess we'll never know. This is prehistoric, but it seems more intuitive or likely to me that dance was just something that was an expression of emotion or something like this, right? It was just a jovial sort of thing. I could be wrong. Maybe he's right here. Maybe it's a mimicking of animals, or maybe it was more of a religious rite or something like this. But, you know, again, I think I'm dwelling too much on this point. I think that's not super important to what he's saying here, right? He's just talking about, again, the rhythm in nature and how this is a basis for art and how we sort of, we utilize this rhythm, we find this rhythm, and we sort of intensify it or we point out certain features of it. We add it as an element of art. And so in that sense, rhythm is an integral part of form for doing. So the formative arts that shape things of use, right, things like a plow or a fork or, you know, objects that we need, utensils. Okay, so the formative arts that shape things of use were wedded to the rhythms of voice and the self-contained movements of the body. And out of the union, technical arts gained the quality of fine arts. Okay, so first we were just making these implements and they were designed in a way that was shaped to fit their purpose. After this, they evolve into a fine art. We get more meticulous about it. We start to craft them with skill and pride. Then the apprehended rhythms of nature were employed to introduce evident order in some phase of the confused observations and images of mankind, right? So this is also kind of Nietzschean, right? So all this chaos and strife through art and through this aesthetic endeavor, we're able to find a sort of calm and a sort of order. That's very Apollonian if you want to use the Nietzschean terminology there. So man no longer conformed his activities of necessity to the rhythmic changes of nature's cycle, but use those which necessity forced upon him to celebrate his relations to nature as if she had conferred upon him the freedom of her realm, right? So we learn how to utilize fire to make, you know, implementations for war, but also eventually works of fine art. And again, he's going to say that this is a mimicking of the rhythms we find within nature. And he brings up the Greek notion of technē, right? He says that this is sort of evidence for his thesis here, right? That the rhythms of nature are sort of the bubbling up from which art can rise, right? It's an essential aspect of experience of a lived creature, but also it's evident in the rhythms of our art. So he says the reproduction of the order of natural changes and the perception of that order were at first close together, right? Now we've separated ourselves from that. We've learned how to build civilization. So our intercourse with nature is not quite as direct. We're able to control and manipulate it, right? But at first this wasn't the case. They were so closely tied together that there was no distinction between art and science, right? Understanding cause and effect, being able to utilize it with tools. That was a technē, right, for the Greeks. They called that technē and art itself was a technē. So for my students at U of H who have been taking this class all semester and you are here for Plato, right? We don't have any of those lectures online. I'm debating whether I should record those. I don't know if there's enough interest. I might go back and record lectures for Plato and Aristotle and David Hume, which is all the stuff we got to cover before this whole COVID-19 crisis forced me online. But anyway, if you know anything about Plato or even the Greeks in general, right, this term technē is sort of a catch-all term. We don't really have an English equivalent. It's typically translated as art. That's not very satisfactory, I think, of a translation, though. Remember, technē, if you remember back to Plato, technē is something that has to do with the craftsman, the craftsman who builds a ship or who's a blacksmith would be considered having a certain technē. Even a rhetorician, right, somebody who's versed in the art of rhetoric and how to speak well, you could argue that's a technē or a skill, okay? And when Plato and even Aristotle talk about art, as we would understand it, the fine arts, you know, making paintings, sculptures, being a playwright, writing novels, things like this, that's also a technē, but they call it the imitative arts, right? It's the imitative or the reproductive, they reproduce. You've already seen that Dewey has his issues with that, with that conception of art as purely representational or purely imitative. He doesn't really like that, but he kind of understands where it comes from for similar reasons as this, right, that we call art and science technē, the early Greeks did, because of this sort of direct intercourse with nature. It was this understanding and organization of nature. Art was, and so was science, okay? So they weren't quite as distinct. So now we finally get into this next chapter. We're not going to cover a whole lot of it. The excerpts that we have from our textbook are fairly short, so they get right to the point, and that's what we're going to try to do here in the video. So let's read this first long quote here, and it ties into this, these points about rhythm that he was just making. So it's a kind of a nice segue we've got going on. So again, this chapter title is The Organization of Energies, and he starts off by saying that it has been repeatedly intimated that there's a difference between the art product, the statue, the painting or whatever, and the work of art. That's right. He's the one that's been intimating this, and I've been mentioning this throughout the lectures. Now we finally get him to explain it head on. You know, he keeps talking about the artwork in a very unique sense, right? When we hear the term artwork, we're thinking of an actual product, a thing that's sitting in a museum. For him, that's not the case, right? That's an art product, right? So for him, that's physical and potential. That's the art product. It's physical in that it's a physical thing, potential in that until we look at it and experience it, it's not really an artwork. It has potential. There's all sorts of things that, you know, I can see it and get something out of it. You can see something and get an experience out of it. We all could, but if it just sits there in a museum and in a museum closet and no one ever sees it, well, that potential is lost. So that's the physical product. The latter, that's the artwork, is active and experienced. Okay, so this is also, I think, somewhat Kantian if you want to go back to the lectures on Kant. I don't know if he would go this far to say that the works of art, you know, are not works of art. I don't know if he wants to use that terminology, but this idea that the beautiful, at least, is something that we experience, but not really a property of art. Art itself is dead and sterile unless it is a part of an active and lived experience of it. Active, maybe not. I don't think Kant would say active. That seems a little too involved or engaged. Remember, Kant wants us to be detached. But this idea that Dewey's putting forth that the work of art is what it does, not the product itself, I think is somewhat Kantian. So it, sorry, so the work is what the product does. It's working. For nothing enters experience bald and unaccompanied, whether it be a seemingly formless happening, a theme intellectually systematized, or an object elaborated with every loving care of united thought and emotion. Its very entrance is the beginning of a complex interaction. Upon the nature of this interaction depends the character of the thing finally experienced, right? So we don't understand the character of a work of art by simply noting all of its dimensions, how tall it is, how deep it is, the colors that are used. We don't really understand the character of the work of art until we experience it ourselves, until we see how it affects an audience, and so for Dewey, that's the key. That's what an artwork is. It's that coming together of product and observer, beholder, he likes to use that word quite a bit, that makes this aesthetic experience. So an aesthetic experience, or sorry, yeah, yeah, an aesthetic experience, the work of art in its actuality is perception, right? So the work is the perception of the product, not the product itself. Only as these rhythms, even if embodied in an outer object that is itself a product of art, become a rhythm in experience itself are they aesthetic, right? So only when this happens, right, only when, you know, as he puts it, these rhythms, even if they're embodied in an object, only when they become a rhythm and experience are they aesthetic, are they aesthetic, okay? And this rhythm is what is experienced sorry, and this rhythm in what is experienced is quite different. It's something quite different from intellectual recognition that there is rhythm in an external thing. It's as different as is the perceptual enjoyment of glowing harmonious colors from mathematical equations that define them with a scientific inquirer, right? So I have a picture here of the fractal. Obviously, you know, if you know anything about fractals, you know that they're, you know, they're based on these mathematical equations, right? They're the visualization, the representation of what we backed up here of mathematical equations. Now, if you are given the mathematical equation and you just read it on a chart or on a page on a piece of paper, you're not going to be able to get the same experience you do out of looking at this fractal, right? As it's representing all these beautiful colors and flows and rhythms. Now, if you're a mathematician and you're really brilliant, you understand numbers and you understand equations very well, you might be able to use your imagination to look at that formula, those marks on the paper, and visualize it as this beautiful picture on the left. I guess on my left, but you're right. But anyway, so for him, this is the difference, right? The work itself is that experience, right? It's much different than the actual product, right? The product itself is just what instigates the experience, what brings to perception this intensity, right? So, the observer, I suppose, plays the key role in the work of art. So, there are certain commonplaces, Dewey writes, that it's proper to utter in connection with art that it cannot be intelligible unless the fact of energy be made central, okay? So, that's something that a lot of artists will talk about. You've got to have some energy. You've got to, you know, there's got to be some umph to this work. It's power to move and stir, to calm and tranquilize. And surely, either rhythm and balance are either characters foreign to art or else art, because of their basic role, is only definable as an organization of energies, right? So, this is what he's going to, he's going to sort of stick his neck out here and sort of make a claim. He's going with this, right? He's going to say that, yes, he believes art itself is an organization of energies. This is what the artist does. They take all of these impulses from their experience and interactions with the environing world and they hone these, they organize these energies together in such a unified and coherent way that a beautiful work of art and aesthetic experience is created. So, if art is, in any sense, reproductive, and he's talked about that before. We went over this in other videos. He doesn't quite like this notion of reproduction. For him, it brings something forth new. So, it's not really representation. It's more properly seen as a new form of presentation. He doesn't completely dismiss the theory, though he sees where it's coming from, because obviously the elements and the ingredients from which we create art are taken from experience, right? So, the mistake that it's just a replication or a reproduction, he says, it's understandable, but it's still wrong-headed. So, for him, if art is, in any sense, reproductive, and yet reproduces neither details nor generic features, it necessarily follows that art operates by selecting those potencies in things by which an experience, any experience, has significance and value. So, the artist takes things, again, that have a certain potency and he organizes them, right? Anything that has significance and value. Elimination gets rid of forces that confuse, distract, and deaden. Order, rhythm, and balance simply means that energies significant for experience are acting at their best, okay? So, and I got a picture here that might not actually be the best representation of this. I like it, though, because I think, you know, this is a noise artist, okay? I'm a, I guess I call me a noise artist. I've played at some of these noise festivals. It's been years, right? But I still jam out. You want to call it that from time to time, right? But this noise artist, right? He's got all these filters. He's got these oscillators in front of him. You know, he's got this little, you know, the cord in his mouth, right? For, you know, the sort of vocoder and all this stuff is processed, right? So, he's got all these sounds and maybe this is not the best example, I say, because for him, he seems to, you know, for Dewey, a big part of the aesthetic experience is, you know, you create tension, of course, but that tension is eventually diffused and there's this sort of equilibrium and this unity and there's this sort of balance and this sort of, ah, you know, that's the aha moment. That's the aesthetic sort of climax, I guess, for lack of a better word, whereas noise music is pretty much like nothing but strife. It's nothing but tension. It's nothing but sort of disorder with a little bit of, maybe a little bit of rhythm and a little bit of order within it. But it's, I mean, it depends on the noise artists. They're different styles of doing noise music, right? But it's certainly an organization of energies. That's why I think this is maybe somewhat saves my example. This idea that it's an elimination that rids forces that confuse. Actually, the noise music will throw stuff to confuse you and disturb you and, you know, your oral, you know, like, oh, geez, this is kind of unsettling, to distract and deaden, right? Actually, some of the noise music is there to distract, to deaden, like, you know, like, oh, this is kind of monotonous. You know, some people just don't get it, right? They're like, this is just weird. Yeah, it is. I like it. I can't explain why. I think it's fascinating. I like that type of music. It appeals to me. I understand why it doesn't appeal to other people. But this is an example, I think, that would give Dewey some problems. Although I find noise music, noise artists, to be doing just what he's talking about here. Taking all of these intense, you know, they'll take samples from a construction side of industrial equipment, you know, those sort of, you know, very intense, high pitch frequencies, low pitch. They'll mix all this stuff together and make sort of soundscapes and layers, right? A lot of it can be very disturbing, not exactly appealing to, you know, the most audiences at large. I find it's really not that enjoyable in most cases to listen to in your house. It's kind of something you've got to see live to, I think, really get the full, you know, if you don't like it, you probably won't like it. But your best chance, if you're ever going to listen to that type of style of art is to see it in action, actually perform live, you know, listening to a recording is kind of like defeats the purpose. And you lose a lot of the intense. Well, I'm digressing. I'm getting on my little noise music soapbox, right? But back to Dewey, right? Art, again, is this organization of these different elements that are taken from mundane experience, but they are, you know, in a sense, they're intensified. They're organized in such a way that brings unity and aesthetic appeal to them. So he's very critical. You see in this quote of using terms like ideal because of all the, I guess, metaphysical baggage that they have on them, especially if you think of the way the term ideal is used in the works of Plato or the medieval Christian philosophers, right? So he he's going to use the term here when he's talking about the organization of energies in a certain sense. The artist is organizing the energies in a way that is ideal, right? Which they fit together and they coalesce in a way that is aesthetically effective. Okay, but he wants to warn us against this sort of more philosophical, more metaphysical understanding of the term ideal, right? So let's read the first half of this quote. I'll kind of comment as I go along. So the term ideal has been cheapened by sentimental popular use. So not only do people like Plato cheapen it, but also when we say ideal, we usually are talking about something, you know, beyond reality, something perfect, something like this. So it's been cheapened by sentimental popular use and by use in philosophical discourse, right? We're talking about Plato for apologetic purposes to disguise discords and cruelties in existence, right? Typical medieval Christian, right? Why does all this evil stuff happen in the world? Oh, don't worry. It's actually good. If you saw the whole picture, you'd see it all fits nicely. And you know, there's a reason for it, right? So he's not he's not on board with those two conceptions of ideal. But in a certain sense, when we look at art and art as an organization of energies, the term ideal is apt. It's appropriate here for what he's talking about, right? He says there's a definite sense in which art is ideal, namely the sense just indicated through selection and organization, those features that make any experience worth having as an experience are prepared by art for commensurate perception, right? So the artist takes all these things together, all these elements, right? If you're the noise artist, you know, you have your stack, you have all your, you know, your oscillators, you've got your mixing board, you may, this guy looks like he's even using 8-track tapes for samples, right? He's got a sampler. All these elements and all these sounds are gathered together and they're sort of mixed, you know, like a stew, right? To create this ideal. If it's a good performance and it is able to affect us in a certain way and give us a sort of experience, right? It's ideal in that sense, right? So there must be, in spite of all indifference and hostility of nature to human interest, some congruity of nature with man or life could not exist. In art, the forces that are congenial, that sustain not this or that special aim, but the processes of enjoyed experience itself are set free. That release gives them ideal quality. For what ideal can man honestly entertain, save the idea of an environment in which all things conspire to the perfecting and sustaining of the values occasionally and partially experienced. And again, you know, after reading that quote, maybe my example of the noise artist is not so good because maybe he's getting a little too hasty here with some of his verbiage. I think that, you know, in a certain sense, yeah, there's this organization and intensity in art, but the idea that it's always going to give you this sense of comfort, right? That's what he seems to be implying in this passage. I don't know if that's what he wants to do, but it seems like he's implying that any work of art is ideal if it's a good work of art because it's an ideal organization of energies and it's always going to give you that sense of repose, equilibrium that you don't really find in lived experience, right? You might have like these momentary lapses of comfort and sustenance where you're fine, you're full, your belly's full, you don't have any worries and no stress, but eventually you're going to keep, you know, moving on and there'll be other obstacles in your way. So these are fleeting moments. And so he's thinking art brings us to these moments in such a way that's even better than everyday satisfaction, right? It sort of takes all these really great satisfactory elements that we encounter from time to time, puts them all together, gathers them up and organizes them in such a way that's aesthetically pleasing and brings us to that spot in such a way, ushers us into this new aesthetic experience that is calming and all this. Again, I think he's, I don't know if he wants to be this hasty. Is aesthetic experience always going to have this calming effect? I don't know if that's really what he intends with this quote. It seems to be like what he's saying. But let's go on here. We're almost done with this video. We're going to go ahead and I guess we should go ahead and stop it here, right? Because we're moving into the next chapter, right? And these videos are going to get shorter and shorter. I promise you now that we're really able to do this, I'm actually able to back up what I claim because these next few chapters, they're not super pertinent, important to Dewey's theory. So I don't have to dwell on them quite as much as the other material. So in the next video, we'll look at the next chapter, the common substance of the arts. We're going to skip the chapter after that, which is the, I forgot the title, the different substance, not the common, but the unique substance of the art, the disparate substances of the art. We're going to skip that one and we'll get into like the last two or three chapters. But again, like I said, I better shut up and, you know, stop this video for now. Thanks for joining me for this one. Glad you're enjoying this stuff. Hope you're enjoying this stuff. If you are, please subscribe. I need more subscribers or else I can't make money off this stuff. I love doing it. It's fun, but it'd be nice to get a little bit kickback for it too. I don't want to lie, especially during all this financial crisis with the COVID thing going on. Anyway, I'm getting a little too much of my own personal drives. Thanks again for joining me and I hope to see you on the other side.