A Slice of my "Useless" Education

Today I was cleaning up this notebook I am working on and came across a lot of old stuff from school. I am going to share a more thought out piece of writing today, but first I want to just briefly talk about school. I got a B.S. in Anthropology with my focus in Biological anthropology - this is irrelevant and tells you nothing about my education or abilities. Here is what my education taught me: to step outside of my own cultural constructs and see the myriad of ways human beings live lives all over the globe, I learned to question sources, to think for myself, that "right" is subjective, and that if you don't "take charge of your own education" (as one of my Greek professors used to say) lasting learning doesn't happen.

There are those who believe I wasted time and money on an undesirable major, and employers who have mocked me in interviews sarcastically asking how I would apply what I learned in their work place. All I have to say to them is this - I did not choose the education I did for you, I followed my passions and interests and loved every bit of it, and because of that, I will retain more and continue a life of learning.

This paper I wrote over four years ago caught my eye as I was sorting through old files and it resonated with me. Obviously when I wrote this I was thinking about "style" in an artistic context. I feel some themes I touch on relating to choices made within sets of constraints, rules, and whatnot could be more universally applied to how people live their lives; if style is living, our lives are a work of art, and we are the artists.

Style is reproducing previous patterns while including certain changes that are a result of choices made by the artist within a set of constraints. Style can be in the behavior of the humans, or in the work of art created by the human. The artist that conforms to them rarely creates these constraints. Instead, they are learned and are a part of the culture in which that the artist is brought up. These constraints can include things that cannot be controlled by the artist. Human choice is what makes style possible. As soon as the artist is able to make a choice, style becomes possible. Here, choice is not always a conscious decision of the artist. Most all decisions that are made are instinctual rather that something that needs to be thought about. It is when the artist consciously considers the alternatives that a style defining choice is made. 

Choice plays a very important role in analyzing a work of art. This is because not only the option that was chosen is considered in analyzing the work, but also the alternative options that the artist could have chosen also reflect the stylistic decisions that were made. Style is also described as the way that something is expressed rather than what the artist is expressing. Style depends on a set of existing constraints and alternatives from which the artist chooses. 

Human behavior is subject to constraints, but constraints do not control human behavior. The way that humans manipulate and respond to their environment can be considered style of human behavior. Constraints work the same way with art. They are psychological and cultural elements that affect the style of a work of art, but it is the artist’s choices that actually create style. For example, in writing, that author’s language acts as a constraint, but the way the author chooses to use that language creates style. Cultures can be subdivided into many different categories that affect the way a work of art is analyzed including, the structure of the culture itself, its ideologies, institutions, technologies, semiologies, the analyst’s cultural baggage, and what the analyst is seeking to explain. This can be seen in the development of writing throughout history. Before the printing press, all written things had to be copied and recopied and were therefore not very accessible to the average person. This greatly affected the types of things that were written simply based on who the audience was.

When two different aspects of human activity are controlled by different constraints, they are considered two different parameters. Once two different parameters are distinguished, one is considered external to the other. These parameters have affected the development of style throughout history, but not as much as the internal constraints. That is, the external factors of the world are not as deeply related to the development of style, as are the internal constraints that affect a work.

When analyzing a work of art, one must begin by describing what is present with the use of “brute facts.” Yet, these facts alone are not enough to describe the style of a work of art. An analyst needs to consider these facts with consideration to the constraints that are present and see how they work together to form an experience for the audience. For example, one might look at a book and see a consistent language that being used. One might also notice separate chapters, paragraphs and sentences, but this does not show the stylistic choices the author has made.

As opposed to constraints that govern the natural world, the constraints that govern human behavior change based on time and location. For this reason, it is more complicated to gain a complete knowledge of constraints that govern style. The constraints that govern style relate to each other in a hierarchical manner. This is important because style can be viewed from many different points of view, from art of a whole culture, to a specific period, to a single artist, and even to a single work of art. The three large categories of constraints are laws, rules, and strategies.

Laws are universal and do not change from culture to culture. They can be physical or psychological. The most important ones concerning style are psychological and concern perception and cognition. There are limited ways a person can create or observe a work of art. These are universal and cannot be changed or affected by the artist.

On the other hand, rules are not universal. They are specific to each different culture. Rules are what distinguish some periods from each other, and link others. They are the highest level of stylistic constraints. When composing a written work, the author must choose a language. This will differ between periods and cultures, but the idea of language is universal. Every language contains its own rules to which an author must conform. The author cannot change these rules.  

To develop a theory of style, different kinds of rules need to be distinguished from each other. The three main categories of rules are, dependency rules, contextual rules, and syntactic rules. A dependency rule is one that is dependent on the syntactical rules of a different parameter. Contextual rules depend on the context in which they are found. They are more independent that the dependency rules, but are not fully independent, and are therefore not syntactic rules. Syntactic rules are governed by an independent set of constraints and are a primary parameter.  

Within the possibilities that rules establish, the compositional decisions made by the artist are called strategies. There are a limited number of rules that exist for a specific style, but the possible strategies within those rules are limitless. Every author could compose books throughout eternity without exhausting strategies and without writing the same book twice. For this reason, specific styles are never exhausted. Within a period, the changes are in strategies, whereas the difference between periods show changes in the rules, which create new styles. A change in the rules may allow different strategies that were not possible previously. For example, in antiquity, the creation of drama changes the rules of previous writing and allowed new strategies to be developed. This shows that rule changes may also make new formal structure possible, which, in turn would require new strategies to be developed. Some strategies become highly characteristic of the style in which they are used. For this to happen, a strategy must exert symmetry, coherence, stability, and a certain amount of redundancy.
A rule or strategy may serve as a constraint to a certain group or individual. These compositional choices are also grouped into a hierarchy of three levels: dialect, idiom, and intraopus style.  

A dialect can be observed when a group of artists invokes the same rules or strategies. These can be determined based on location, nationality, or different movements. Social class of the artist or the cultural function of the work of art can also determine a dialect. Take drama for example. When the Greeks created this art form there was a very specific type of stage on which it was performed. They also had aspects to their productions like a choir, all male performers, actors wearing mask, and singing and dancing in the middle of the stage area. If we were to see this nowadays, it might seem out of place or odd. This is because playwrights of ancient Greece were all working within the same dialect.

An idiom can be observed when a specific artist employs certain constraints, rules, or strategies that set their work apart from others’. An artist’s idiom is usually divided historically, that is, their early, middle, and late works. Aristophanes is an example of an artist that did something different from what everyone else was doing. He began writing comedies and farces that reflected life at the time and people that everyone knew of. This was very different from tragic plays that had been done previously.  

Intraopus style is based on a specific work of art done by a single artist. It is noticed when an artist has a specific work that sets itself apart from others because of a different use of constraints, rules or strategies. Lysistrata by Aristophanes was a unique work because it was the first play to represent a female mortal character as completely good and almost exerting manly qualities. This stylistic choice of how he represented this character makes this work stand out from his others.  

An analyst must be very familiar with the style he is analyzing because he needs to know all possible options that were available to the artist, in order that the analyst can know what was possible, and not what the artist presented. If there is a lack of information about the environment a work of art has come out of, the analyst will lose all aesthetic value the piece would have had. Inevitability is also an important aspect in analyzing a work of art. When an analyst says that a specific stylistic choice was inevitable, or logical, he is simply saying that the artist’s choice was optimal and he himself is not able to think of a better stylistic choice. If the analyst is unfamiliar with the style he is looking at, he will not be able to sense inevitability. Because an analyst need be so familiar with the style he is analyzing, it is not surprising that critics often misjudge works of art.    

In conclusion, an artist’s stylistic choices require options, and the reasons for the choices made show intent. The artist having intent demonstrates that he also had a goal, which would be set based on the ideologies of the culture. Therefore, for one to be capable of fully understanding and analyzing a work of art, he needs to be very well educated regarding the culture the work was produced in, and have an understanding of all other options that were available to the artist. Without this, a work could easily be misinterpreted or misjudged.   

So, maybe when we look at any one person's life we need the same goggles as a highly educated art historian analyzing a work of art. For, until we understand the cultural constraints in which all our choices are made I believe we are just as likely to misjudge each other as an untrained eye is to miss a masterpiece.


Marci
~With love