131. Freedom and the Arts

  
-->

 

"Whoever decreed that a word must have a fixed meaning?" asks Charles Rosen (New York Review, 5-10-12).

"What the hell makes you think anybody decreed it?" I ask.  "There's no tyrant behind the demand that words have a fixed reference to things in the world.  It's need.  Little prairie dogs have to learn that a certain sound from a fellow prairie dog means 'Hawk! Dive into your hole.'  Little children have to learn that 'STOP' means 'Stand on the curb until Daddy gets there.'  A fixed meaning.   Jeez, didn't these romantics ever take a kid to school?"

For Friedrich Schiller, Rosen's backup, "the conventions of language and of society are in principle arbitrary — that is, imposed by will."  Ja, mein oberst, will.  It's not the hawks, it's not the traffic, it is, once again, some damned tyrannical father. 

And you know who that father is when the kids get to college?  Me, the English-composition teacher.  Enforcing the conventions of common usage.  Rosen knows that I, with my standard marks in a student's margin (like Reference?) am needed, and even gives me a boost.  Conventions "are the bulwark of civilization, a guarantee of social protection." But still, conventions can be "a prison cell."  In which case there's me (or paranoid me), the cop, throwing children and artists in jail.

I appreciate the freedom the artist longs for. A painter friend of mine looked at the dreary winter landscape of Southeast Ohio and saw how our lovely, thick summer forests had become a bunch of twigs.  He painted the trees with an exaggerated twigginess that, against an unnaturally grey sky, showed me what I had missed about them, and made me view their winter aspect with fresher, more appreciative eyes.  I'm glad he felt free to wrench the real world around his way

But why does Rosen have to enlarge this freedom to include freedom from my composition classroom?  Why does he make referential language the strongpoint of the citadel that has to be stormed?  To me the citadel (or whatever) Rosen's artists and children (and a lot of postmodernists) are storming is the citadel of the knowledge that equips us to live in the world.   It's every public offering in which the knowing say to the ignorant, "This is what you can't wrench around your way."   Today it's all the science courses in the university, yesterday it was all the theology courses, and many days ago it was all the plays we saw in the theater.  The earth will heat up, God will punish, and you can't get a wind for Troy unless you sacrifice your daughter. 

That's meeting a need, according to the knowledge of the time.  The most reliable knowledge in our time is conveyed in referential language governed by logic.  It's what the knowing adults know now and the ignorant little children and prairie dogs don't.

I have not met any artists who do not want their children to get safely across the street.  But more and more critics and theorists are interfering with their ability to do so. Do they think they are defending their art? the humanities?

If they do, they are confused.  Confusion is the problem.