COMENTARIO SOBRE RAMACHANDRAN & HIRSTEIN (1999)
“LA CIENCIA DEL ARTE”[1]
EN LA REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS SOBRE LA CONCIENCIA, vol 6, nº 6-7
En mi entorno cultural se dice que el
hombre es el único animal que tropieza dos veces en la misma piedra. Y desde
luego parece increíble que, después de más de cincuenta años de estudios
cognitivos, cuando por fin algunos científicos intentan cubrir el foso que
existe entre las artes y las ciencias repiten viejos errores. Errores que,
según mi entender, están casi totalmente erradicados en los trabajos de
lingüística cognitiva sobre las figuras retóricas, como la metáfora, la
metonimia, etc. (ver, por ejemplo, Lakoff (1993), Gibbs (1994), Sperber &
Wilson (1986/95), etc. etc. y etc.). Nadie cree en estos campos que sean las “leyes
de la Literatura”. Al contrario, se ha
demostrado que son maneras absolutamente normales y corrientes del proceso
comunicativo humano; lo que pasa es que, como todo quisque, algunos
escritores las utilizan para comunicar sus mensajes artísticos.
No obstante, cuando nos acercamos a las artes no
verbales, parece que ahí está esa piedra en la que los investigadores siguen
tropezando sin parar. Lo que más me asombra en este caso es que los científicos
que escriben en este número de la revista son o neurobiólogos o cognitivistas,
personas que estudian el cerebro humano o la mente humana con métodos muy
ajustados. Y sin embargo, muchos de ellos (¡si no todos!) no cumplen el primer
requisito que Noam Chomsky propuso hace más de cuarenta años para que una investigación
fuera realmente científica: que llegaran al nivel de adecuación OBSERVACIONAL.
¿A qué objeto o evento se refieren estos autores
cuando hablan de “arte”? ¿Nos están mostrando el comportamiento (mental y/o
social) de los artistas cuando se ponen a crear (¿?), o sobre los espectadores
que observan el resultado de tal comportamiento, o se trata de la calidad (¿?)
de esos resultados? Para decir verdad, después de unas cuantas lecturas sobre
el artículo y sus comentarios, no he sido capaz de descubrirlo.
COMMENTARY
ON RAMACHANDRAN & HIRSTEIN (1999)
"THE
SCIENCE OF ART"
IN JOURNAL
OF CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES, Vol 6. nº 6-7
In my cultural environment
we say that the human being is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone.
It certainly looks amazing that, after more than fifty years of cognitive
studies, when at last some scientists try to bridge the gap between art and
science they repeat old misconceptions. These misconceptions are, to my
knowledge, almost eradicated in cognitive linguistic studies on figures of
speech, such as metaphor, metonymy, etc. (i.e., Lakoff (1993), Gibbs
(1994), Sperber & Wilson (1986/95), etc. etc. and etc.). Nobody
pretends in these fields that they are the "laws of Literature". On
the contrary, they have been proved ordinary ways of human communication that
some writers use, of course, in communicating their artistic messages. And yet,
when we come to the visual arts, there seems to be a new stone in which people
keep stumbling once and again. What really astonishes me is that these
scientists are either neurobiologists or cognitivists, people who study the
human brain or the human mind with strong causal constraints in their
methodology. An yet, many (if not all) miss the first requirement that Noam
Chomsky proposed more than forty years ago for a research to be considered
scientific: the level of OBSERVATIONAL adequacy.
To what object/event are
the authors referring to when they speak about
"art"? Are they talking about the (mental and/or social)
behaviour of the artists when they engage in creation (?), or about the
reactions of the beholders when they watch the results of that behaviour, or is
it the quality of these results themselves that are at stake? To tell you the
truth, after a few readings of the paper (and the commentaries) I could not
make it out -maybe the real reason is my poor English or, worse, my deficient
brain /mind!
The first thing to do,
from my point of view, is to be sure wether we are all thinking about the same
thing here. This is the problem I find with some of the criticisms to the
central paper: they are really talking about something else which, unluckily,
they do not try to pinpoint either. As it is, I think that a lot of ideas (most
of them, actually, as far as I can judge) in both the central paper and in the
commentaries are indeed interesting and might be very useful if they be
properly framed in a true cognitive hypothesis about art.
Let me try to show what I
understand could be a way to start a cognitive (i.e., scientific) hypothesis
about ART. I am, professionally, a linguist of the Chomskyan persuasion. Maybe
this is the reason why I tend to view human social phenomena as deriving from
human communication. My first idea, then, was to think art was a kind of
communicative behaviour that might be describable (in some algorithmic way)
and, later, explained (in the natural selection framework). Now, cognitive
studies in human communication received, from my point of view, a tremendous benefit
from the work of Sperber & Wilson (1986/95: Relevance. Communication and
Cognition, Oxford: Blakwells)
It became apparent to me that
art could not be considered a type of communicative behaviour, they way Sperber
and Wilson masterly describe it. They make an exhaustive account of the effects
communicative behaviour has in order to be relevant for people. But what is
more important, they study the ways of the mind in directing this sort of
behaviour. And this was the light that affected my turning point in considering
the object/event "art". Let me give you a couple of linguistic
examples to illustrate their idea.
Suppose we have the following
two statements:
(1) I will come tomorrow
(2) John has always been
very intelligent
Ever since Austin and Searle,
we know that (1) can be a promise or a threat, among other things, according to
the context in which they are processed. Austin and Searle said they could be
different speech acts. But, although they explained how one could distinguish
them, they never tried to explain why they were different. Anyway, it
was a beginning. Ever since Grice, we know that (2) can mean what it says
(i.e, that John has a positive mental quality) or imply the opposite
(that John is some kind of mug) if we are able to use the flouting of the maxim
"be true" in this particular case for communicative purposes. Again,
Grice did never explain why this happened that way, although the
importance of the context was mentioned here as well.
Sperber and Wilson are
cognitive researchers (which, neither Austin, Searle, nor Grice were) and so
they describe, not only how those two messages and many others work like
they do, but also why indeed. I am not going to go into all the
details, but only in the essential part of the argument. For Sperber and
Wilson, we are able to treat information in different ways. This ability is
what they call attitude. So, humans have different attitudes that change
the way we process incoming information. Thus, in example (2), if the contextual
information is for instance, the idea that John, who is already forty, still
believes in Santa Klaus, the apparent contradiction is solved by processing (2)
as if it came with an implicit injunction "process this message with an
ironic attitude". They then explain the selective value of some of these
attitudes.
I propose to consider
"art", from a cognitive point of view as an (or a
series of) attitude(s) in Sperber & Wilson's terms. The very same process that
changes the above message meanings into different speech acts or senses is
basically at the origin of what we call art. Only in this way, mind you, can
one explain why we are able to perceive art in a broom hanging from the walls
of a modern art museum, or in a war report (my favourite example!) as Caesar's De
Bellum Civile. It all depends on your attitude to it. There is a very
poignant example of this in a De Sica film of the early fifties, Miracolo a
Milano, in which the protagonist, Toto,
convinces his very poor neighbours of one of the derelict slums of that
northern Italian city to gather and watch the sun go down as an artistic
performance. He succeeds so well that when the sun disappears, everybody starts
applauding with great relish. You need not have a "peak shift law" to
explain this kind of artistic experience, though I am sure this effect
may appear in many examples of art, as anything else might!
A scientific discussion on
art, at least one that would make any sense to my poor understanding, would
have to agree or disagree FIRST on the concrete object/event I have tried to
name with that abstract word art. I am certain that there might be
disagreement even on that first move, but I want to know why and, also, if
there is a better object/event for the picking. Then, when we would have agreed
on that, we should proceed to describe it as clearly as possible. Algorithms
that order representational transformations (i.e., a kind of Turing machine)
would perhaps be an acceptable way. However, some might prefer PDP approaches.
I know of no other possible explicit means to describe mind
processes, though I admit they might exist and be explanatory in a full sense.
If they do, they should be explained as well. I have, of course, my own ideas
on the development of this research, but my main purpose here is to ask
interested people in finding a common ground where our efforts might be of any
collective use. It is the only way I can think of to start building a workable
cognitive theory of art.
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[1] Aunque normalmente no se
traducen los títulos, como éste era en inglés y va en una sección española, me
he permitido traducirlo también.