Transcript Tessarolo_Bordon - Project Anticipation

First International Conference on
ANTICIPATION
5-7 November 2015, TRENTO (Italy)
“
Mariselda Tessarolo, Eleonora Bordon
University of Padova
“Anticipation and creativity in art”
1
Premise
Every experience realized by mankind has always provoked further
future expectations, to the point that past experience and expectation
for the future have progressively separated and expressed in the
concept of “progress”. The experience of technic progress implies that
it is not possible to foresee when, where and how much rapidly it will
be invented something new, nor what (Koselleck, 2009). An innovator
is a subject who’s not afraid of abandoning tradition, some of his
interpretations initially intended as “deviations from the system”, as
“errors”, were nothing but a “displacement of the system” (Tynianov,
1968).
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Premise
An artist has always been considered an anticipator, his imagining
before others what could be of interest is a way of working in advance,
and because of this he isn’t often understood by his contemporaries.
The contemporaneity, besides, to understand it should see its own dark
spots, but they are the ones nobody expects and they are seen only
when what is new is not linked to “contemporaneity” anymore
(Angamben, 2008).
The anticipation and the prediction bring the future in the present, they
are more than “a glimpse toward future”, they are terms given to
vanguard, word which referred to art addresses an movement which
opposes to tradition modifying the consolidated perspectives and
which, once the new universe or rules has been rebuilt, asks artists to
conform (Dal Lago, Giordano, 2014).
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Premise
Vanguard always follows two ambivalent points: abandonment of old
rules and creation of an alternative rules system. “If the action of the
formers [abandonment] seems to be like a liberation of energy, that of
the latters [creation] can be understood as an encroachment so much
striking to be in contradiction with itself” (Dal Lago, Giordano, 2006).
The distinction proposed by Husserl between “project” and
“protention” in which the former is placed in the future and may or
may not happen and is in opposition with the latter intended as a
perceptive anticipation (Romano, 2010).
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Protention towards the future
Western philosophy also emphasizes an intrinsic incapacity of
philosophers to account an event’s temporality which is never
completely contemporaneous with the one who happens to. The most
evident paradox is that in which resolves the Husserlian reflection
about the constitution of time: the words Husserl uses to define
conscience’s activity constituting time, protention, retention, absolute
perception, make indeed reference to a collocation of conscience itself
inside time (Husserl, 2002).
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. Protention towards the future
The memory of an event emphasizes the same tripartite structure of
perception: the memory, in its false present there is a ritention relative
to the preceding events and an anticipation relative to what happened
afterwards. The anticipation of an event, also, has the same structure:
an artificial “hour” packed together with a past or a future. Therefore
inherent memory, perception and prevision all present in this form of
tripartite temporality and they differ among themselves for the degree
of opening of the chances relative to their mobile indicators of the
“now”. Along the “memory alley”, retentions and protentions are fixed,
closed, finite, anticipation instead with relative past and future is open:
nothing on the temporal line has to be necessarily as it is anticipated
(Husserl, 2002, pp. 303-4).
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Protention towards the future
An important point for creativity is “becoming aware” (noticing,
recognizing, understanding) that it is the moment to change, or that this
moment is getting closer. The one who understands why one has to
change must also understand what must or can be changed in that
moment. If we discuss of anticipation of something, what is anticipated
must then be accepted and inserted in everyday reality.
It seems that the characteristics of the postmodern vanguard are ‘only’ or
specifically those of “undermining the pre-constituted consent”, unlike
the modern artists who wanted to “trace paths” which would lead to a
“new and better consent”. “The postmodern destroys, deconstructs,
hates every canon which as such becomes embarrassing. Postmodern
artists locate inside both strategies: their activity places in the point of
confluence of the two strategies” (Bauman, 2002).
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Anticipation and postmodern art
In this sense one could say that all post-modern art is an anticipation of
what the periods after us will accept as base rules. But this certainty
doesn’t exist, nobody can have it. What is and has been defined art
comes from experiences and actions for their nature continuative and
collective. Such a situation derives from the fact that the experiences
were nothing else than “the steps of many on a previously well marked
road, provided of finger-posts all wayfarers can easily read” (Bauman,
2002). Every experimentation is something completely else: he who
experiments gropes, draws maps of unknown terrains, anticipates
possibilities believed impossible or impracticable.
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Anticipation and postmodern art
Culture does not reside only in the representations, but also in the body
processes of perception by means of which the representations take
form, that is to say in the practices. Bourdieu remembers that we have
two relations with time, one with the past (memory) and one with the
future (project): in the project the future can or cannot happen and,
remembering what Husserl said, there can be an opposition with a
future as protention or perceptive anticipation, seen as relation to a
future which is not such, which is an “almost present” (Bourdieu,
2009). Similar perceptive anticipations, almost a sort of practical
inductions based on a previous experience, form part of the habitus as
“game sense”.
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Anticipation and postmodern art
Before art, the language presents possibilities bound to the verbal times.
Guyer’s analysis is based on the concept of ‘near future’(anterior
future) (Guyer, 2007; Poli, 2010). The question it rises is if the near
future includes “an emptiness, a space, a break in time” – that is a
singularity which cannot be described but only believed and witnessed.
If, indeed, the “near future” forecasts a temporal break, this implies
that the preceding frames which give temporal coherence have been
substituted by a series of new frames “thing which implies a constant
temporal arbitrage to remain on the surface”. In Italian language there
is a peculiar verbal time: the anterior future or compound future.
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Anticipation and postmodern art
Actions not yet done or supposed are moved in the past. Anterior future
generates a proactive ability associated to an increment of the problem
solving: to describe a future event one has to “see it as if it had
happened”. It is a structuralizes thought and therefore action to the
execution which one prepares himself to. The simple future seems to
lack the planning activity, the anterior future allows to think to an
action as if it was already done (Weich, 1979; Tessarolo, 2007).
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Examples of anticipation in art
The anticipation in the various arts manifests in various ways, starting
from music (or poetry) one can observe that a phoneme and a note are
parallel because “neither the phoneme anticipates on language nor the
note anticipates on music” (Brandi, 1975). What happens in language
is something which is already modified through the linguistic
elaboration itself. In music one can find that many airs with
harpsichord were preceded or followed by a very brief orchestral
chorus of 12, 10, 8 measures which announced the repetition of the
motif of the air. Evidently it had the task of refresh in the listener’s
memory the motif, the melodic idea (Della Corte, Pannain, 1952).
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Examples of anticipation in art
To the same end responded another peculiar expedient, as in the
chamber cantata, which was used for long time and called “prolepsis”
(anticipation or flash-forward) consisting in the anticipation of the first
word or words and of the first cell of the air, before beginning the true
an real exposition of the theme. Musically the notes anticipating those
of the harmony which immediately follow are generally called
anticipations. These are notes extraneous to the harmony and they are
found on the weak time of a measure (Della Corte, Pannain, 1952).
Examples of anticipation in art
The anticipation is the not yet been: which is not the simple future, the
“not yet been”. Listening or composing music “one has to try to
produce the sensation that in the first sound or chord of a musical
period is already contained all that follows (Adorno, 1969)” and “the
other facet of the problem of listening is to complete such listening
from moment to moment, with a perception ability which knows how
to hold in itself what is past and what is to come”. It is a matter of
remembering differences and similarities, of anticipating expectations.
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Examples of anticipation in art
Every work of painting is therefore “necessarily a punctum temporis”
or an instant. But the memory of the observer will give the previous
and the future developments thing that cannot be done where this
knowledge lacks. Gombrich (1985) refers to the work of Lessing about
Laocoonte: “the painting can only use a unique moment of action and
therefore it has to choose the most essential, which makes what comes
before and after more understandable”. The moment, or the instant
chosen by the painter for the painting, is never “enough fecund”. But it
is fecund only what leaves free outlet to fantasy. The painter has the
arduous task of giving to a brief moment, torn from the fleeting time,
an essential and lasting existence”.
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Examples of anticipation in art
Some painters were anticipators of styles and thematics, suffice it to
think to Bosch and to Magritte to make two examples far in time. The
former has richness of inventiveness in his works, true and proper
visions, he invoked various doctrines among of which was
psychoanalysis. The latter was a precursor because he anticipated
problems which future generations would have clashed with. The
anticipation can have various forms. There are writers or painters who
anticipate discoveries only with their fantasy like Verne has been a
visionary talent, anticipator of the modern science-fiction. Another
visionary writer is Orwell who anticipates the world division in areas
of influence and the new panotticon.
Examples of anticipation in art
In literature with the lector in fabula there is a constant anticipating
presence in the narrative: the forecasts as prefiguration of possible
worlds (Eco, 1979; Iser, 1987). “Entering the state of waiting means
making forecasts”. The model reader is summoned to cooperate to the
development of the fabula anticipating its following states. The
reader’s anticipation constitutes a portion of fabula which should
correspond to the one he is going to read. Once he has read he will
realize if the text confirmed or not his forecast. The ending not only
verifies the reader’s last anticipation, but also some of his remote
anticipations and gives a judgment on the forecasting ability of the
reader (possible worlds).
Conclusions
The situation of this our contemporaneity shows us that artists are
effectively our contemporaries because as such they succeed in seeing
the dark spots of our time (Agamben, 2008) which are those which
even existing are not seen.The post-modern artist has to live on credit
because the practice, which his anticipatory action gives life to, does
not exist yet as a ‘social fact’ nor as an ‘aesthetic value’ (only the
posterity will know). This uncertainty strikes the creating artist, but
also the user who finds himself “not understanding”, not feeling a
sentiment of completeness, but realizing that there is something
different, something new which breaks with the past.
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Conclusions
Kant speaks of creative premeditation in the aesthetical judgment: the
work of art reassembles a unity which welds the fragments of a shared
unity. Art is in the middle way among many mystifications: it is not so
detached from material reality as to reach the absolute beautifulness, it
is not so strongly bound to an unconscious sensitiveness and finally it
is not slave to human reality. It is necessary not to attribute to artists of
a certain epoch the historical interpretation of their contemporaneity
because this latter doesn’t see clearly all of itself and he who come
afterwards interprets it with his own contemporaneity obviously
“subsequent” or posterior anyway.
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Conclusions
The art as practice is rooted in the texture of the collective existence in
which the individual which assumes it “searches for reasons, excuses
and justifications, but, at last, he has to face a specific activity the
constant evolution of which neither the primitivity nor the holy could
take account of”. We agree with Duvignaud (1979) when he observes
that the work of art constitutes a bet on the future aspects of
experience, in this way “our insufficiency towards ourselves, lead us
towards what does not exist yet”.
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References
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