Hi, Ted -- thanks for your reply. It seems to me that there's a tension in what you suggest, probably an irreconcilable one. Still, the issues with what you've written are worth drawing out. You say:

The end product or the end state has to be determined before we can start eliminating what is nonessential to it. 
We don’t rationally determine what kind of life to lead, or art to make, as much we intuit it.  We intuit, then make.  Those who live life as art have first imagined the particular life. Filling it with what is essential to it, and no more, makes that life.  Choose the wrong things and...

First of all, I think here that you're falling back on a false use of the word choice. On one hand you describe a choice of end -- which I would call rational, not in the sense of being the logically best choice, but in the sense of being a clear decision within consciousness. On the other hand, you describe a process of intuiting, which you basically seem to be saying is a way of feeling how to best go forward to the desired end. More fundamentally, for you the desired end seems to be a kind of image (at least: in the realm of the imagination), and the imagination is a kind of half-true, half-dreamed country which shimmers over true reality almost as a guide, until by drawing down its gifts we can make the reality of that dream manifest.

I disagree essentially with all of that. I don't think we choose in advance, at least not in the particulars, if we want to seriously do creative work.  We can choose a direction to walk in, but not much more than that. I strongly disagree that becoming one's essential self consists in, or even primarily consists in, manifesting one's imagination. I think on the contrary creativity has, in an essential sense, to do with the interaction of interior and exterior, and with one's own response to real things outside oneself -- things, so to speak, which raise questions inside us, create voids into which answers rush, which we wouldn't otherwise have been able to articulate. (a related post)

& thus I also disagree with your question "essential for what?"

If you get what I'm saying I hope you'll understand the spirit of my response: critique is not something to take personally, it's a demand for clarity of thought and precision of ideas. If one takes thinking seriously, one can't do otherwise. After all the "other," as I've said, by calling things into question sometimes clears a space for one's own creativity to emerge. In discussions here, I think we all take turns playing that role.

Mia, I’ve been having trouble with logging on.  That’s why it took me so long to reply, but thanks.  For the demands.  Without obligations to clarity, or even a likelihood of being held accountable, it’s easy for me to be satisfied with simply approximating an idea, settling for subordinate ideas juxtaposed together and taking the juxtaposition as proof, rather than expending the energy to connect them solidly to prove them with coherent language, making a whole that’s able to go out into the world on its own.  In other words… missing out on all the fun.

I’ve given your ideas a lot of thought, or as much as time will allow.  Concerning our topic we differ in two areas.  One, choice.  The other, imagination.  I hope that after this we’ll agree that our differences have been only in terminology, not in substance. 

I see us agreeing on the eminence, if not preeminence, of things outside ourselves in the real world.  I suspect that though we may have differences in our conceptualization of it, the differences don’t prevent either of us from establishing our own scale of appropriateness, ordering what we feel is necessary to enrich our lives and ignoring or actively rejecting the rest.

Let’s commence by considering choice, taking that choices made in the activity of painting are analogous with those made in life at large, justifying the conflation because of the simplification it provides. 

There can be no painting (nor person) without the collision of artist and world. The question is whether the painting and the consequent artistic direction can be influenced in a weakened world, i.e., when the world is not as active as are the artist’s internal, imaginational if you will, processes.   

The practice of skill itself is an active choice and a rejection of mistakes; a rejection of all the possibilities that a mistake would provide.  But if art is a living process, which the best art always is, then the new possibilities a mistake would provide are given due chance to determine the painting.  Post mistake, it’s often a wasteland.  With the original painting in ruins the artist must rebuild out of the wreckage, what it suggests.  Incipient, and often equally valid solutions move to the front and wait for the artist to choose between them.

You’re correct: we can’t predetermine the details of the painting.  The painting, at times, seems to paint itself.  One developing form after another, each a perfect complement to all that proceeds it.  The example of the mistake is illuminating because form and all forward momentum have collapsed.  It becomes a crisis of inwardness.  Objective criteria collapse into the background and subjective ones are brought to the forefront, suggesting the onus on the subjective during the beginning of the painting, except that at its beginning a painting sometimes has a quasi-rational overlay.

In the aftermath of the mistake, in order to resume, there must be some criterion.  Generally, there must preexist a criterion for any action to be initiated; criteria are the conditions for an action.  And post mistake it must be a subjective criterion, chosen from a store of fundamentally personal criterion, because the painting has collapsed.  It is formless and without momentum.  There must be personal reasons for the person the artist to either accept something and include it in the painting, or to reject it, or even to move forward again or to abandon the work. 

Subconscious activity, with its hidden but very, very real and concrete dictates, sends its children onto the playground of the imagination.  At least when we’re fortunate.  Because if not fortunate then the subconscious plays directly upon action, which can more directly result in unwanted and sometimes deviant or liable behavior.  The imagination is the place of subjective choice, as opposed to rational thought, which is the place of objective choice. We have the ability to let subconscious elements stop and play, prove their benevolence to our psyche in our imaginations before we give them leeway in our behavior.  Or the artwork.

The currency of the imagination is emotion.  Granted, we work with symbols, but a symbol is inert without its analogous emotion.  If we don’t choose the objective details of a painting beforehand, then we choose this analogous emotion beforehand.  But it can never be anything vague. The creative impulse demands particularity.  Not only does the artist have to narrow the painting down to a set of meaningful things, but their aspects must be limited to what suits the creation of a very particular object, a very particular art object.  And the world doesn’t cooperate.  Without the artist’s volition the world will appear very conservatively, according to the will of the unconscious and of the subject’s native conceptual framework, however much they seem to be, feel to be, bewildering (and savage?) arrays.   

It’s in this particular corner of the playground of consciousness that is the imagination that artistic choices are made, and made emotionally. In fact, if we are to transcend the mundane we must, from the metered flow of the world into the painting, make sophisticated and relevant choices.  We must, and we must imagine.

If the final product of a painting is a certain arrangement of color and form, then no, we cannot choose beforehand.  However, if the final product is a particular emotion, one which comes to fruition latter, when the spectator interacts with the work, various colors and shapes of emotion that have never existed before (unique because they are woven into the flow of time at this exact spot), then it’s not out of the question to assume that the artist had experienced this emotional cocktail previous to, or concurrently with the existence of the objective art work , and had concluded, chosen, that the emotion would be the cargo that the final product would deliver to the spectator, or become the final product itself.  The artist had held onto this constellation of emotion, holding every color and form up to its light.  What was proven in it became essential, what not…. nonessential.

What happens to me, within me, can’t be considered universal.  But no single person is absolutely unique.  It stands that what happens to me can happen similarly to those who share certain traits and characteristics with me.  So, I assume there are at least a few who have predetermined their lives much as an artist predetermines the artwork—in the sense that I have chosen values that gave rise to a particular set of emotions, and that those emotions, that emotional tone, precede me through life, guiding me. I preprogramed myself to make the choices on action/value that would infuse my subjective life with my valued emotional tone. 

Since the time of “finding my voice,” my late twenties, this almost archetypal (thus single) emotion/object has walked before me, breaching the thicket of life for me.  There have been times when I have lost my guide, my way, and the reason? I failed to restrict myself to what would have been essential to me.  The painting collapsed because the composition was overwhelmed by nonessential objects. 

If in this sense we live our lives as an artist, then we can’t pick out the details, what will happen to us, not in advance, if ever—often it seems to be nothing but chaos and randomness, often beauty and randomness.  However, we can indeed choose to incorporate only those things that contribute to our chosen value system, and to reject those things nonessential to it. And yes, those previous choices have been made emotionally.  By imagining a certain life and judging its accompanying emotional tone!

 

So, no we can ask a broader question Mia.  Emma first brought its possibilities to my attention when she recommended a materialistic reading of history.  I learned it was a Marxist reading.  It basically says, if I have it right, that material developments such as food supply and labor conditions and technological developments are history’s sole determinates.  I’ve given this some thought.  I may eventually learn enough about it to assuage my doubts, but as of now they stand.  

It’s the direction your comments tend, or so it seems to me, when they put real things outside oneself in a position of dominance, the subject with little role but to, in the interaction between inside and outside, respond.

…creativity has, in an essential sense, to do with the interaction of interior and exterior, and with one's own response to real things outside oneself -- things, so to speak, which raise questions inside us, create voids into which answers rush, which we wouldn't otherwise have been able to articulate.

Granted, you give the subject a role, even an important role.  But in restricting the subject to the activity of only responding to the outside world you place total ontological and epistemological genesis in materiality.  I use the word imaginative creatively here, giving it more importance than more accurate thought would, but still it serves a purpose.  It drives a pole in opposite end of the field from the objective.  Between them they mark a place for thought. To focus on the important parts of what I argue, the necessity of establishing a generative place other than the objective world, I ask you to allow me the sloppiness that timeliness requires, and accept that role for the imagination.  Unless some difference would prove fatal.

What would prove one view over the other?  The single pole or the dual, one or the other?  Perhaps the initiation of thought.  If I try to think while positing only a single pole, whether the subjective or the material, it doesn’t matter which, it becomes impossible to think.  Thought requires comparison. 

After all, our ideas are only virtual approximations of what happens in the flux of the specious present.  If they exist only to facilitate a better life, ideas must be formulated that will continue the thinking, with the hope that it can clarify our directions.  Exclusively materialistic determinations, I believe, stifle the thinking process.  While flattening the world they remove from examination everything subjective.

Materialistic determinations, when exclusive, misplace freedom, situating it in material.  However important the freedom to have shelter and enough to eat, it is only partial freedom. 

Marxist materialism has a lot to recommend it.  It helped rotate our focal line from the vertical of metaphysics to the horizontal plane of the individual and of society, where we can initiate change, change the conditions of our material lives with our own welfare in mind. (That communism failed is beside the point—Marx supplied the theoretical framework for material equality.) Along with concurrently developing capitalism Marxism, for the first time in history, moved determination from the elite centers, spreading self-determination along common ground. It’s ironic (because capitalism and Marxism have been given oppositional positions) that capitalism has, in practice if not in theory, placed the focus of development on the same place as has Marxism: changes in material conditions, its most recent development being electronic communication and the displacement of the autonomous individual into it.  In backing away from Marxism we have traveled full circle to stand with it, back to back, as if withstanding common foes.

Both failed.  As will any theory of history that gives sole impetus to materialism.  If metaphysics has been irrevocably defeated it must give way to alternate ways of empowering individual subjectivity.  The individual here defined, as it must be if we are to have true freedom, not as the freedom to acquire goods, even necessities of survival.  Additionally, we must have a way of paying as meticulous attention to the spiritual side as we do the material.

The spiritual used here not in the traditional religious senses, but as all things interior.  All of it included perhaps within the boundaries of the imagination.

Thanks!