Value Competition

Creativity in Art, Technology, and Business

Jan Lourie, an artist who combines computer-rearranged, fractalized photos with other images into "metaprints" that sometimes resemble cubist renditions of buildings and sometimes work from other traditions, (in one print that I particularly liked, a Chinese water painting), gave a talk yesterday at Dana Library on creativity.  My RBS colleague Lee Papayanopoulos moderated, and recruited me and my colleagues Faroborz Damanpour and Farrokh Langdana to comment. 

 http://lp.rutgers.edu/metaprints

She focused on a 1937 conference featuring the French mathematicians Henri Poincare and Jacques Hadamard, in which they speculated on a subconscious process by which creativity arises to the surface, juxtaposing that conference with 1930s Freudians, a Herbert Simon paper, John Searle-like questions on whether creativity is involved in certain situations (for example, if someone finds a randomly-generated series of notes that corresponds to a work by Bach and recognizes it as excellent), and questions about the nature of the creativity involved in a business discovery like just-in-time inventory (could it involve an analogy to a surgeon's just-in-time team?). 

Lots of interesting things were said by all; invoking poster's prerogatives, I focus on my own reactions.  Since Jan's presentation fit very well into value competition themes, I was very happy to riff on how one could try to analyze the subconscious creative process alluded to by Hadamard and Poincare in terms of calculative and cultural centers of reason.   I claimed that that combination could be used to analyze what was going on in the J-I-T case (analogical, pattern-oriented reasoning plus calculation) and in Jan's own art (quasi-algorithmic logic ciombined with an overall pattern sense); I closed with an effort to draw in self-other themes a la Freud and their connection to creation.  (The thought I had in mind but didn't express involved the degree to which effective as opposed to ineffective creativity, for all of its association with individuality bursting free from social constraint, also involves a close alignment with certain social norms.)

My day-after question for myself: My remarks implicitly assumed that the same calc-culture, self-other framework that can be used to analyze optimal incentives in business and politics can also be used to analyze optimal incentives in art (and also, though I wasn't making that point, in science and technology).  I think that's true, but I also think that a lit crit analysis of how lit works or a physics analysis of how atoms work will wind up being quite different from a management analysis of how firms work.  The production of truth and beauty may well prove to be quite comparable to the production of the good, but there will also be more than a few differences that any decent future theory will have to have some good takes on.

 

John Updike

Literature is a land of value contradiction, not value competition.  But Updike was tacit value competition, with the calculative craft of his beautiful sentences and the cultural ends of his art pushing one another forward in a cycle of productivity that climbed the alpine heights as few have ever done for so long and so well.  Because Updike was a sensible man who was not contradiction-haunted, he can be judged lacking compared to other artists thus haunted.  But I disagree; Freud remains the exemplary psychologist of the twentieth century, notwithstanding his out-of-place espousal of value contradiction in a domain that has turned to the practical, ameliorative spirit of value competition, and John Updike strikes me as the exemplary American writer of the twentieth century notwithstanding his sunny, sexy, satisfiedly suburban soul.

The Anxiety of Influence

In a 1973 work of criticism that owes a great deal to Nietzsche but that lacks Nietzsche's ability to fuse literary creativity with a scientific spirit--he has Nietzsche's passion and his flair for vatic utterances but not his logical clarity--Harold Bloom maintains that strong poets are formed through an agonistic, Oedipal grappling with their strong predecessors.  

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-influence.html

Bloom can be recast in rational choice terms: Poetry of the highest quality, like mathematics of the highest quality, demands familiarity with other work of the highest quality as a precondition to the advance of the discipline.  The lack of readily verifiable standards of quality and progress in poetry as opposed to mathematics leads to a personal engagement with past masters in the former discipline as opposed to the latter.

The RC recasting of Bloom, plausible as it is, leeches the lifeblood out of his portrait of the strong poet wilfully misreading his predecessors.  A value competition recasting, though not immune itself from the pale sickliness of utilitarian reason, is closer to the original: The strong poet is one in whom reverence for the tradition and iconoclasm are at war within the poet in an intense, fruitful way that for at least a moment, a moment that will soon enough be lost, lifts the poet's powers to the heights at which the great poets of the tradition dwelled in their moment. 

Hidden Pastiche

"S & M: Shrines and Masquerades in Cosmopolitan Times," showing at NYU's 80 Washington Square East Galleries, features videos, fabric art, photographs, sculpture, installations, and paintings by African artists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/design/03chan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

There was no explanatory material on the walls, and I did not see a written gallery guide.  Possibly for that reason, I found myself responding more to text-laden work by Kwame Akoto (portraits with scriptural passages and other writing) and Layton Ynobe Lewis (a disturbing meditation about gay sex and separation from oneself) than to the other art.  I suspect that if the exhibit had had the standard art-speak on the walls or in a booklet, I might well have found the Lewis and Akoto works overly wordy and insufficiently realized as integrated works of art.  That is, I often, even typically, experience museum art as a pastiche with text.  Deprived of that text, I find works that I would see as less than compelling pastiches of clashing approaches (values, we shall say) to be a satisfying fusion of opposing elements/values.

Junot Diaz and Cathy Park Hong

...read at Rutgers-Newark yesterday: http://mfa.newark.rutgers.edu/writersatnewark0809.htm

A few value competition observations: Both writers rely on a tension between elite "MFA/MLA" language and immigrants' language.  That tension is useful in countering the "tyranny of MFA/MLA-speak" problem for creative writers (which is perhaps especially acute in poetry (Hong's field)), but creates a risk of writing that is a pastiche of MFA/MLA and immigrant argots rather than an effective fusion of them.  I was not convinced that Hong avoided that risk in her poems about Desert, an imaginary Las Vegas-like city, which juxtapose Borges/Calvino allusions and the Korean-American pidgin of the "Tour Guide."  Perhaps as a result of having read his novel previously (or perhaps even because of partiality toward him as a Rutgers graduate), I was convinced by the sparely-written passage that Diaz read of Oscar Wao facing his doom in the Dominican Republic in a field of sugar cane rustling like trifids. 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz's novel http://www.junotdiaz.com/ didn't work for me most of the way through, and then did.  I didn't find the narrator's incessant n-word references to Dominicans--perhaps another post on that theme--or his gangsta, babe-magnet persona persuasive, and the equally incessant Tolkien and other fantasy/sci fi references and analogies--Trujillo as Sauron, etc.-- seemed peripheral, distracting, and/or politically confused for a few hundred pages.  The story coalesced for me with the return of Oscar, the love-obsessed, fantasy/sci-fi-obsessed New Jersey Dominican-born hero, to the DR to meet his doom.  A semi-VC line on why: In New Jersey, the heroic quest of Frodo Baggins and the chivalry of Sir Galahad, and the aspirations of Oscar Wao to follow in their footsteps, are casualties of modernity and its rational culture of efficiency and democracy.  In the more traditional culture of the DR, on the other hand, Oscar in his fatal quest for the love of a prostitute with a vicious police officer boyfriend is more akin to Frodo and Sir Gawain.  Diaz does not make the lot of immigrants from the DR in New Jersey, or the possibility of the DR's becoming a modern, highly productive state like Japan, Norway, or New Jersey, nearly as sad as Tolkien made the passing of the age of the elves and Sauron--hurrah for that possibility, I should say, and I suspect Diaz might agree--but he did in the end make me believe emotionally in the analogy between beauty and brutality intertwined in a traditionalist, fatalist DR and evil and virtue bound together by rings and deeper forces of fate in Middle Earth before the Age of Man. 

Beauty

A weekend and a Monday of arts in NYC, with Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" directed by Peter Brook:

http://www.nytw.org/tgi_info.asp

and Harry Potter/Daniel Radcliffe along with Vernon Dursley/Richard Griffiths in Peter Shaffer's "Equus":

http://www.equusonbroadway.com/

and Joan Miro at MOMA:

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=3993

It all led me to think about the application of a value competition approach to aesthetics.  One line: VC is about what's good or what works, not what's beautiful (or what's true).   The opposite line: VC deals with motivating competing agents to come up with beautiful (or true) work, not just socially beneficial work. 

I think the second line is right; that is, I think VC rightly understood can contribute to understanding the social circumstances under which successful art is produced and how successful art manages competing values and preferences.  But to do a good job rather than a risible one using VC, one should know quite a lot about the field one is commenting on...with that chastening point in mind, a brief application of VC to the three shows:

Dostoevsky in "The Brothers K" and Peter Shaffer in "Equus" strike me as successful in avoiding an art-damaging commitment to either an elite disdain of popular taste or to a popular disdain of elite taste.  By contrast, Miro's work in his 1927-1937 "assassinate figuration" period strikes me as instantiating elite disdain of popular taste, and consequently as lacking a protection against collapse of quality, despite Miro's own great gifts and ability to do strikingly novel work.