excerpts from Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art by Gregory Bateson
They say that “every picture tells a story,” and this generalization holds for most of art if we exclude “mere” geometric ornamentation. But I want precisely to avoid analyzing the “story.” That aspect of the work of art which can most easily be reduced to words — the mythology connected with the subject matter — is not what I want to discuss. (...)
I am concerned with what important psychic information is in the art object quite apart from what it may “represent.” “Le style est l’homme meme” (“The style is the man himself”) (Buffon). What is implicit in style, materials, composition, rhythm, skill, and so on?
My goal is not instrumental. I do not want to use the transformation rules when discovered to undo the transformation or to “decode” the message. To translate the art object into mythology and then examine the mythology would be only a neat way of dodging or negating the problem of “what is art?”
(...)
“Meaning” may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and “restraint,” within a paradigm of the following sort:
Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain “redundancy” or “pattern” if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a “slash mark,” such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side. Or, in engineer’s language, the aggregate contains “redundancy.” Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing.
(...)
The essence and raison d’etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by “restraint.”
It is, I believe, of prime importance to have a conceptual system which will force us to see the “message” (e.g., the art object) as both itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe — the culture or some part of it.
The characteristics of objects of art are believed to be about, or to be partly derived from, or determined by, other characteristics of cultural and psychological systems. Our problem might therefore he oversimply represented by the diagram:
[Characteristic, of art object/Characteristics of rest of culture]
Classical Freudian theory assumed that dreams were a secondary product, created by “dream work.” Material unacceptable to conscious thought was supposedly translated into the metaphoric idiom of primary process to avoid waking the dreamer. And this may be true of those items of information which are held in the unconscious by the process of repression. As we have seen, however, many other sorts of information are inaccessible to conscious inspection, including most of the premises of mammalian interaction. It would seem to me sensible to think of these items as existing primarily in the idiom of primary process, only with difficulty to be translated into “rational” terms. In other words, I believe that much of early Freudian theory was upside down. At that time many thinkers regarded conscious reason as normal and self-explanatory while the unconscious was regarded as mysterious, needing proof, and needing explanation. Repression was the explanation, and the unconscious was filled with thoughts which could have been conscious but which repression and dream work had distorted. Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious, e.g., primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing.
These considerations are especially relevant in any attempt to derive a theory of art or poetry. Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic. The computer men who would program the translation of languages sometimes forget this fact about the primary nature of language. To try to construct a machine to translate the art of one culture into the art of another would be equally silly.
Allegory, at best a distasteful sort of art, is an inversion of the normal creative process. Typically an abstract relation, e.g., between truth and justice, is first conceived in rational terms. The relationship is then metaphorized and dolled up to look like a product of primary process. The abstractions are personified and made to participate in a pseudomyth, and so on. Much advertising art is allegorical in this sense, that the creative process is inverted.
In the cliche system of Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly assumed that it would be somehow better if what is unconscious were made conscious. Freud, even, is said to have said, “Where id was, there ego shall be,” as though such an increase in conscious knowledge and control would be both possible and, of course, an improvement. This view is the product of an almost totally distorted epistemology and a totally distorted view of what sort of thing a man, or any other organism, is.
Consciousness, for obvious mechanical reasons, must always be limited to a rather small fraction of mental process. If useful at all, it must therefore be husbanded. The unconsciousness associated with habit is an economy both of thought and of consciousness; and the same is true of the inaccessability of the processes of perception. The conscious organism does not require (for pragmatic purposes) to know how it perceives — only to know what it perceives. (To suggest that we might operate without a foundation in primary process would be to suggest that the human brain ought to be differently structured.)
(...)
Similarly with skill, the fact of skill indicates the presence of large unconscious components in the performance.
It thus becomes relevant to look at any work of art with the question: What components of this message material had what orders of unconsciousness (or consciousness) for the artist? And this question, I believe, the sensitive critic usually asks, though perhaps not consciously.
Art becomes, in this sense, an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, if you prefer it, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind.
I am indebted to Dr. Anthony Forge for a quotation from Isadora Duncan: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”
Her statement is ambiguous. In terms of the rather vulgar premises of our culture, we would translate the statement to mean: “There would then be no point in dancing it, be-cause I could tell it to you, quicker and with less ambiguity, in words.” This interpretation goes along with the silly idea that it would be a good thing to be conscious of everything of which we are unconscious.
But there is another possible meaning of Isadora Duncan’s remark: If the message were the sort of message that could be communicated in words, there would be no point in dancing it, but it is not that sort of message. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of message which would be falsified if communicated in words, because the use of words (other than poetry) would imply that this is a fully conscious and voluntary message, and this would be simply untrue.
I believe that what Isadora Duncan or any artist is trying to communicate is more like: “This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication.” Or perhaps: “This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious. The message of skill of any sort must always be of this kind. The sensations and qualities of skill can never be put in words, and yet the fact of skill is conscious.
The artist’s dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting; and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it.
If his attempt is to communicate about the unconscious components of his performance, then it follows that he is on a sort of moving stairway (or escalator) about whose position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his efforts to communicate.
Clearly, his task is impossible, but, as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily.
It is sometimes said that the distortions of art (say, van Gogh’s “Chair”) are directly representative of what the artist “sees.” If such statements refer to “seeing” in the simplest physical sense (e.g., remediable with spectacles), I presume that they are nonsense. If van Gogh could only see the chair in that wild way, his eyes would not serve properly to guide him in the very accurate placing of paint on canvas. And, conversely, a photographically accurate representation of the chair on the canvas would also be seen by van Gogh in the wild way. Re would see no need to distort the painting.
But suppose we say that the artist is painting today what he saw yesterday — or that he is painting what he somehow knows that he might see. “I see as well as you do — but do you realize that this other way of seeing a chair exists as a human potentiality? And that that potentiality is always in you and in me?” Is he exhibiting symptoms which he might have, because the whole spectrum of psychopathology is possible for us all?
Intoxication by alcohol or drugs may help us to see a distorted world, and these distortions may be fascinating in that we recognize the distortions as ours. In vino pars veritatis. We can be humbled or aggrandized by realizing that this, too, is a part of the human self, a part of Truth. But intoxication does not increase skill — at best it may release skill previously acquired.
Without skill is no art.
It is probably an error to think of dream, myth, and art as being about any one matter other than relationship. As was mentioned earlier, dream is metaphoric and is not particularly about the relata mentioned in the dream. In the conventional interpretation of dream, another set of relata, often sexual, is substituted for the set in the dream. But perhaps by doing this we only create another dream. There indeed is no a priori reason for supposing that the sexual relata are any more primary or basic than any other set.
In general, artists are very unwilling to accept interpretations of this sort, and it is not clear that their objection is to the sexual nature of the interpretation. Rather, it seems that rigid focusing upon any single set of relata destroys for the artist the more profound significance of the work. If the picture were only about sex or only about social organization, it would be trivial. It is nontrivial or profound precisely because it is about sex and social organization and cremation, and other things. In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata.
From Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pgs. 108–123.