I have no idea how Chesterton address what we're talking about
He says that things going right is far more beautiful and poetical than random things. That chaos is ugly and easy, and order beautiful and difficult. You genuinely don't see how this relates to our discussion?
but I just feel sorry for Will who dismisses people so easily.
Yeah, not to pile on him or anything, but Chesterton is about the last dude in the world I'd recommend to will. If I were ever somehow compelled to recommend books to will, that is.
This is so vague... virtues... collide... what? Order and chaos are intensities on a single measure of difference. They are just characters stopping over along the road up into infinite difference and away from the One. You talk like each is some kind of unique force. Similarly, Socrates/Plato saw the separate virtues as stopovers along the road to wisdom. They just divisions of a single movement.
That's precisely what I'm saying: true virtue never needs to be compromised at the expense of some other virtue. The degree to which it seems like they do is the degree to which we misunderstand one or more of them.
And yeah, I'm seriously proposing that you ought to speak the way I do, because I think it's closer to how things are.
Well heck, now you sound like I did when we last discussed the nature of language. Aren't you suppressing the beautiful flow and evolution of language by telling me I should use words the way you use them?
This is uncanny. It's the classic individualist story of creation. As if each moment of creation is a singularity that is assembled all on its own without past or influence. It places the entirety of the work into the hands of the artist, and the artist is master over his work. He has, let's just say it out loud, full ownership over his property.
The truth of the matter is -- and we can discuss this -- art is fundamentally dependent on a preexisting order. Art is always in history and through time. There is no art freed from past or present. No art freed from culture, from language, from the subject. One definition I presented in the past that you seemed to like was that art is whenever an object is freed from its utilitarian use. But how can we define art in terms of a freeing from if it was not first bound?
Art is meaningless without context. It is fundamentally context. And the movement it make through that context is not one of increasing order, not one of reaffirming the existing order (that is utility) but changing that order. Freeing itself from any known use. Creating newness, difference, chaos.
Nothing I said about art in any way implies that human creation is an isolated event devoid of context, and I don't believe it is.
Totally wrong. This is not something that can be relativized. Chaos is not some thing you hold in your hand. There is chaos and there is more chaos. There is infinite chaos potential. You simply increase the chaos. The previous chaos was the order. That's the only way to even think coherently about it. It's not like once you make it to this place called chaos there's no place to go but back...
Nothing I'm saying presupposes that chaos is an item, or that you can achieve some perfect level of it. Nothing at all. I only presuppose that things can be
more or
less chaotic relative to some other thing. For example, a pile of rocks is more chaotic than those same rocks assembled into a wall.
When you say "There is chaos and there is more chaos," you've already conceded that chaos can be relative because there can't be such a thing as
more chaos unless there is also such a thing as
less chaos.
The only actual definition of entropy (order/disorder) is difference. Order is the most probable state. Disorder is the least probable state. Art has to be new, unexpected, different. It can't be the same old. The same old stuff isn't art. It takes on a different form. That's why art can only be thought through history.
I think I see the problem. You're focusing on the homogeneity of entropy, but I think it's a mistake to call this homoegeneity "order." Order and sameness are not synonyms; the concept of order also contains intent and purpose. Something is orderly insofar as it conforms to some goal; mere homogeneity, unaccompanied by any structure, is not order. You might notice, for example, that all of the dictionary definitions of the word "order" presuppose some kind of intent. Order requires an orderer.
I also don't think it'll do to think of creativity only in terms of probability. Being technically able to paint anything is not more creative than
actually painting one thing, even if that one thing was chosen from a much narrower set of choices and possibilities.
What the hell... give me an example of how this is even true metaphorically.
But you've already agreed with it. If entropy is sameness and predictability, and art is emphatically neither of these things, then art is the opposite of entropy. You might not agree with my related conclusions about order, but you've already agreed with this idea by itself.
Why am I even debating this? A: I have a vested interest in this language. It is fully developed by thinkers like Deleuze, and I'm not sure there's much reason to prefer the opposite notion. If art is suddenly the proliferation of order, then art isn't creativity, and that's just crazy.
It would be, if that's what I was saying. But my problem lies with that middle part of the syllogism where you simply equate disorder with creativity. According to that principle, flailing about wildly without purpose is somehow "more art" than, say, painting a portrait, because it is less predictable, less common, and less constrained by preexisting parameters.
I also just think your definition of the direction of art (towards order? wtf) makes zero sense.
If you think order and sameness are the same thing, then it's not surprising you would think it makes zero sense.
The mere fact that an artist will sometimes step back and look at their work, and decide to modify it, proves that they are judging the work against some specification. Whether that specification is reality ("I am painting this to look like that actual landscape") or an idea ("I am trying to create something that conveys a feeling I have"), the artist is still creating to a specification. This is true if the art is rigidly planned out in advanced or created ad hoc.
It also occurs to me that you're approaching the issue from an entirely different perspective: I'm talking about what art fundamentally
is, and you're talking about which kinds of art are more valuable. Your approach is rather like that of an art critic, I think: you try to place it into the context of other art so that you can measure how "new" or "different" it is. But it's art even before you've done this; measuring how new it is is just one way to decide how much you like it. It is already fundamentally an act of order with a purpose, whether you find it groundbreaking or trite.