… The recognition and recreation of all form in social life can be seen as simultaneously recapitulatory and anticipatory. To establish form is to abstract key attributes from past and current instantiations with a view to re-embodying them in future ones. Entextualization, or the art of making things stick, is therefore really the art of laying down the means for new creation.
Both of today’s posts are from an essay “Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick” by Karin Barber in the book Creativity and Cultural Improvisation eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold (2007):
…People’s ceaseless innovative and re-creative activity is often directed precisely towards making a mark that transcends space and time. Improvisation and the art of making things stick cannot be separated: we find them everywhere fused and intertwined.
Two venerable models of the nature, place and scope of social innovation lie behind current thinking. One proposes that the normal situation is inertia, stability and repetition.
… in traditional societies, stability and continuity are the default situation and are associated with conformity and a lack of originality; change is exceptional and — when it is not the result of external forces — it is associated with individual innovation and creativity.
The other model starts from the opposite assumption — that everything that happens is new, unrepeatable and not wholly predictable from what went before.
… Scientists and historians seek to find rational order and stretch this back so that the present may be seen to follow from the past; but in fact time itself is constituted out of a succession of ‘interruptions.’ What takes place does so ‘under necessary conditions,’ but these ‘do not determine in its full reality that which emerges.’ The past is ‘as hypothetical as the future’; the present, defined by the emergent, is constantly breaking new ground. The problem here, then, is not how to explain change, but how to account for the social creation of continuity.[ quotes within that paragraph are from G.H. Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (1932)]
In trying to think about how new things emerge from the matrix of the customary on the one hand, and how people go about solidifying the flux of social life on the other — issues which clearly lie at the very centre of anthropology — we find ourselves ambushed at every turn by latent binary distinctions: between ‘text’ and ‘performance’; between scripted and improvised enactment; between memorization and composition; between creativity that leads to a concrete ‘product’ and the creativity which is an end in itself.
… What is most important for the purposes of this [essay] is that perdurance is conceived as the outcome of vigorous, unremitting activity. Things do not last through inertia: they are made to last, through intense human creative efforts. Making things stick, then, is most definitely flagged up here as a practice, a process in itself.
… If understanding social life is at least partly about understanding how people give form to their activities, then kinds of behavior often consigned to the margins of social theory — dance, song, verbal art — become central … This is not so much (or not only) because … performance genres are a privileged place where there is more innovation and creativity, but because the effort to give form here has a reflexive, demonstrative dimension in which its own processes are, as it were, brought to the surface. … Performances attract attention by framing and staging creative, form-giving processes, and in doing so, they not only designate themselves for future re-creation, but also bring to view the operations by which they are constituted. All cultures, I believe, produce forms that are marked out for special attention — whether or not they are thought of, locally, as something we could translate as ‘art forms.’
… Battling against long-standing tendencies to reify and freeze [performance genres], this [performance] theory [in the 1980s and 1990s] strongly contrasted ‘performance’ with ‘text,’ declaring tha the two were utterly different in kind.
… Dwight Conquergood elegantly sums up the opposition as a war of vocabulary, where the benign forces of ‘improvisation,’ ‘flow,’ ‘process,’ participation,’ ‘embodiment,’ and ‘dialogue’ are ranged against the enemy lexicon — ‘fixity,’ ‘structure,’ objectification,’ reification,’ ‘system,’ ‘distance,’ and ‘detachment.’
… But out of performance theory came its own inverse and complement, the concept of ‘entextualization.’
… Form-giving activity — of a kind that constitutes cultural entities which are recognized as preceding and outlasting the moment of their performance — always draws upon the conventions of genre, and at the same time sublty modifies them.
To hear a symphony as a symphony, to hear a fugue as a fugue — in short, to hear any music as form — is then to hear it as repeatable, and hence as independent of its realization in sound on any particular occasion. [N. Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (1990)]
To recognize a symphony as a symphony, an epic as an epic, or a yam-growing incantation as such, requires a consciousness of genre. Genre conventions are not usually reducible to ‘rules’; rather, they are a bundle of attributes adding up to an overall impression, which is recognized as one would recognize personality. Recognition is built up through exposure to numerous instantiations of the genre; but each instantiation also adds an increment, and thus subtly adds to the genre’s range of possibilities. Genre, therefore, is like the past in G.H. Mead’s philosophy: it is continually reconstructed retrospectively, as every new thing that happens occasions a readjustment in the perception of those that preceded it. Genre, then, arises from memory — the composite memory of overlaid, overlapping experiences of individual performances or texts. But genre is also prospective: it is a set of expectations of form. Composers create in the expectation that certain formal attributes will be recognized and understood as such; audiences interpret in accordance with expectations which the genre’s conventions have aroused. Even when the composer’s aim is to rupture the conventions and generate something wholly novel, the effect depends on both composer and listeners recognizing and expecting the conventions that are being broken.
… The recognition and recreation of all form in social life can be seen as simultaneously recapitulatory and anticipatory. To establish form is to abstract key attributes from past and current instantiations with a view to re-embodying them in future ones. Entextualization, or the art of making things stick, is therefore really the art of laying down the means for new creation.
-Julie
