24 July 2021 
11 mins Alva Noë explores the question Why is the perspective of an artist so different from that of a scientist? The way art associates itself with creation, knowledge and understanding is quite different, and at times opposing, to the way science attends to these matters.
...it (art) is its own manner of investigation and its own legitimate source of knowledge.
One way to rationalize this can be that art allows for introspection of our conscious lives as we live and experience it; pause for a moment and face ourselves experiencing the world along with our own consciousness. Alva Noë goes on to elucidate three ideas -
- Art is not a technological practice. It is an engagement with our practices, beliefs, techniques that organize and help reorganize ourselves.
- Art is rather a philosophical practice. More controversially, philosophy is an artistic practice.
- Art (and its future) depends technological advancements to acquire meaning on its own.
The book delves a lot into reversals of commonly asked questions just as an artist might do. Is human breast-feeding just a biological act of nurturing which also forms an emotional bonding between the mother and the baby or Is an act of love and embrace (enabling the release of beneficial oxytocin) that has been evolutionarily triggered by mammalian breast-feeding? The latter is the artistic perspective and is yet another way to experience and understand our world.
Art organizes & reorganizes
To be alive is to be organized...
The first aspect of art is that it organizes us. Any activity that organizes us has artistic potential as also helps us introspect and reorganize. An activity can be said to be organized if it is natural or basic, has delicate cognitive involvement, structure, adaptation/responsive (a sort of entrainment and "going with the flow"), a function and helps reach some emotional state. These six qualities, the author proposes, are crucial for organized activity and art.
A remarkable point is that the organized activity requires both delicate cognitive involvement and entrainment but without deliberate contemplation and control. These apparently opposing qualities can be patently found in a musician's performance. This intermediate state, referred as embodiment state, is the result of habitual practice of that activity so that it becomes one's second nature.
It is our nature to be absorbed into organized activities...
These organize activities provide the spark that transitions into art. Choreography is given as an example, where the movements are staged; yet it is different from dancing which we recognize as art. Choreography is indeed an organized activity, yet its performers can sometimes transition to (or discover the hidden ability for) dancing. This is one of the crucial abilities of organized activities. This ability to discover the hidden knowledge is very much akin to that of philosophy. While philosophy is mostly based on dialogue and pondering, art can sprout from any organized activity.
Choreography makes manifest something about ourselves that is hidden from view because it is the spontaneous structure of our engaged activity.
Art helps us investigate this absorption and transition to spontaneity, thorough an entirely different route from a scientific method. Furthermore, we are designers by nature. We constantly look for ways to organize and develop tools and technologies that enable them; we think using those tools and technologies. These eventually lead to a space where organizations can evolve.
Technologies organize us; properly understood, they are evolving patterns of organization.
Art takes its impetus from the fact that we are organized but are lost in the nesting, massively complicated patterns of our organization
As because of the evolving nature of technology, art usually busies itself with making things - painting, composing, building etc. However art may transcend even this and its future may not be about making things[1]. This possibility leads to newer ways of reorganizing ourselves. Art imparts new context and meanings to the technologies, which inturn evolves and leads to more art. This demands a self-conception of the organized activity.
A work of art is a strange tool, an alien implement. We make strange tools to investigate ourselves.
By creating new contexts, art can in fact obscure the tools and our experience using those tools. Being an artist is to deal with cycles of ephemeral moments of profound clarity about ourselves and constant obscuration and redefining of our tools.
Writing may not be the mirror of language but it mirrors language's self image.
New artistic forms emerge when one organizing activity tries to associate itself with another existing art form. For example, when one initially starts to write(an organizing activity) about dancing(art), the activity itself is so transformative and imaginative that writing itself becomes another art form. This in turn influences how we think about dancing. This is akin to the way initial writing was developed - first to record and describe speech but took its own path to become an art from that is no long about speech or language but to think with. However, writing and speech has evolved to me inseparable over time than writing and dancing or any other art. We are still preliterate when it comes to most art forms.
Art & Cognition
Alva Noë extends Anne Hollander's idea that culture itself shapes our perception, albeit perception being a more antecedent, fundamental and individualistic human character. A point in case is the modern "selfie" culture, where every moment is picturized and elevated to a status that is different from our normal perception on that very same moment. So are we predisposed to elevate our perceptual outcomes to an aesthetic level?
Aesthetic sensing, as we have considered, is a kind of seeing that is detached and contemplative. It is a type of visual evaluation. It is never simply a felt response, no matter how strongly felt. What makes it aesthetic is that it stems precisely from a curiosity and disinterestedness about one's very own inclinations to respond.
Simply put, aesthetic sensing requires a certain cognitive ability to contemplate the perceptual response - a certain disengagement with the world and reflection about the response; as if it were a picture. This ability, in us evolved humans, is naturally present. And to respond to Hollander's view, the way we react to culture is that our culture is fundamentally shaped according to our aesthetic sensing ability - albeit in a multitude of ways.
Art is what enables technologies like smartphones, cameras etc. to be developed, which in turn alters our perception. This change in perception is reflected in art - or simply art is the exhibition of this change or reflection or the study of perception.
Art's effects are not immediate. And they are never simple and unproblematic or direct in the way that the pleasures of food and sex are simple and unproblematic and direct. Art's responses are always perturbable by criticism, by questioning, by context, and by reflection. They are magnificently and necessarily cultural.
Art aims at the disclosure of ourselves to ourselves and so it aims at giving us opportunities to catch ourselves in the act of achieving perceptual consciousness - including aesthetic consciousness- of the world around us. Art investigates the aesthetic.
A work of art is not merely a trigger for a feeling or a perceptual response or anything else. In that sense, it is nor merely a thing. It is a work. Art is a topic.
Art as a strange tool
Noë defines strange tools are those technologies or tools (or even technical practices like speaking, writing) that have been denuded of their function. A work of art is a strange tool, a perversion of technology, one that goes beyond a technology that is tied to its function, subverts its functionality.
Design stops and art begins when we lose the possibility for taking the background of our familiar technologies for granted, when we can no longer take for granted what is, in fact, a precondition of the very natural-seeming intelligibility of such things as door knobs and pictures. Art starts when things get strange.
Art happens when tools begin to introspect their functionality, their place in their surroundings, their interaction with the world, and attempts to go beyond them - occluding their purpose in the first place. A strange tool indeed! However, we can still recognize art on the basis of their organizing (and reorganizing) capability. A work of art instigates the inquiry into our relation with the tools and our surroundings, unveiling us to ourselves in the process. w
Art is in the business of affording us the opportunity for just this kind of transformation from not seeing to seeing. In this way, art recapitulates a basic feature of our perceptual experience, to wit: that our consciousness of, perception of, access to the world around us do not come for free. We achieve them, by thoughtful and active looking.
The common perception about art, leading to the usual criticism of modern art, is that art needs skill, express an instant representation of beauty [2]. We then fail to engage with art that do not follow this. We fail to continue the conversation prompted by the art. Criticism is indeed a continuation of this conversation.
Art is a problem for itself.Art is always, whatever else it is about, an engagement with other art, with artists, and audiences, and teacher and students. Art is, really, itself, a critical practice.
Nöe extends philosopher Daniel Dennett's idea that brain is merely a syntactic engine and the evolved consciousness is a semantic engine. Though reorganization, art is an neuroscientific experiment about our own perception and understanding. Art imbibes the experiencing person, signally a way into an analysis of our consciousness, constrained by our brain. For instance, visual artistic explorations provide insights into our consciousness though the constrained 2D perception of the world. Therefore artistic explorations are neuroscientific investigations indeed and should be considered as equally valid. Furthermore, artistic investigations and experiences leave neural traces through reorganization.
Aesthetic judgements are the beginning of conversations and not their conclusions. Art is in the setting of arguments, criticism, and persuasion.
If works of art are strange tools,..., always demanding that we look differently and try to see what don't quite know how to see, then it isin't surprising that we run the risk of failing to see anything at all and just finding ourselves trapped and disengaged with the works around us and with out lives.
The fact that philosophy (and aesthetic discussion) is not a science, that is does not admit of experimental methods or other form of decision procedures that settle the facts, once and for all, does not mean that philosophical disagreements are not real. They are real. They are objective. But what's at stake is not the facts. What is at stake is how we assimilate, make sense of and, finally evaluate the facts.
Closing Thoughts
The author never misses an opportunity to point out that the above aspects of art is natural (even technologies are natural). A question arises in my mind - Is art an inevitable consequence of evolution? At what level of organized activity does art begin to emerge along the evolutionary path? Clearly deriving pleasure from surroundings does have its evolutionary benefits, but when do we start aesthetic sensing?
Accepting Plato's view of art is to accept things as they are, at face value, and acted out of good natured impulses, well tempered by good judgement. In such an ideal world, there would be no need for art, or say, medicine. Accepting Plato's world is to accept non-human existence.
| [1] | Salvatore Garau's invisible art - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27385358. The comments in the hackernews thread may be of interest to you. |
| [2] | Of course, modern artists have used the fact that art, however strange, is indeed a tool whose interactions and relations to humans or our world can then be explored and inquired through more art. This looping (self-referential) nature of art is indeed one of its most nature-like aspects. |
All the above excerpts are attributed to their original author(s). Book info -
Noë, Alva, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, 2016. Hill and Wang. ISBN-13: 9780809089161 ISBN-10: 0809089165