Decorated Tools vs. Art for Art's Sake

Seen by animals or by organisms fundamentally different from ourselves, we would appear to be obsessed by time and space.

THE BODY AS THE SOURCE OF VALUES AND RHYTHMS

In Chapter 11 of Gesture and Speech, “The Body as the Source of Values and Rhythms,” Leroi-Gourhan—having just called for an analysis of aesthetics as a third aspect of the phenomenon that until now has been elaborated in terms of technics and language—attempts to weave aesthetics back through the prior embodied analysis. It’s not just that aesthetics is fundamentally an embodied experience, it’s that it is likely that “intelligent symbolization can have a reflex action and that everything in the human being is therefore assimilable to the workings of aesthetically constructive thought.” (281) And, to the extent that this is part of a deep set of relationships that undergird the symbolic but are also part of sensory apparatus and sensations, that it(contra a simple structuralism) “must always remain infra-symbolic.” 

The apparently off-the-cuff example that he gives became the subject of much debate: “You cannot create an image of a salty taste.” Without rehashing the discussion, let’s just qualify this to mean something like: if all aesthetics works across sensory mediums, as a kind of translation, something is always lost, but also is only possible because of a kind of excess of the infra-symbolic. And so you can make an image of a salty taste, if you want, but only by way of an abstraction and diffusion of relations that render it something else. But the larger point he is making here is that the aesthetic, rooted in the rhythms of the body, are also the location of a kind of endless improvisation aimed at a “quasi-permanent secondary state” that escapes the dominant sociological rhythms that control daily life. He moves a little fast and loose here through the mystic schools, characterizing them all as practices of stepping outside of time and space. Which lands him in the poetic, but tenuous, claim that acrobatics and dance are liberations from gravity. Let’s instead hold him to the more precise claim that they are attempts to locate gestural possibilities outside of the dominant operating logic and its rhythms. And this is aesthetically rich, he argues, because of our deep muscular sensibility. “Unlike the skeleton, which in the normal state is not perceived, its drapery of muscle is the seat of strong impressions. Our osteomuscular mechanism may be regarded not as a tool, but as the instrument of our insertion in existence.” (286) 

That said, humans have long crossed the threshold into the symbolic, and so down the rabbit hole of images aesthetics will go. Leroi-Gourhan will consider the question of balance, going forward—for better or worse—as a matter of sight and hearing.

FUNCTIONAL AESTHETICS

We should do well to remember that Leroi-Gourhan is heading towards a position in which art is a fundamental mechanism for articulating the potentials within our increasingly technical life. But he is doing so by arguing for its deep intertwining with all of the forces of sensory life and the exteriorization into technical forms. “Art for art’s sake” gets us nowhere. (And by extension, we could pose this as a critique of a certain form of education for education’s sake, as well.) For Leroi-Gourhan, Functional Aesthetics is not in opposition to symbolic or expressive art, but as the ground out of which all aesthetic forms emerge. It exceeds—while also cleaving to—utility, prior to codified symbolism. All of this is going to hinge on the question (or impossibility?!) of balance. And interestingly, he is going to locate balance as a kind of driver of forms themselves, gradually integrating over time. (299) Underlying any kind of decorative level or “veil,” objects tend towards functional balance, and there are only so many ways that this can be achieved. (Although this remaining variability is precisely what becomes interesting!) But it is balance that organizes the sense of any given functional/aesthetic object. The problem of course is that balance is complex—all the more so for the swiss-army knife generalism of the human—and would need to “be analyzed at four levels simultaneously, which is impossible because of the linearity of rational thought and of language.” (302) (This is interesting, because the symbolic actually becomes a kind of impediment to infra-symbolic coordination.) And so we plod on, taking the four levels (function, form, materials, and rhythms) apparently two at a time, before rhythm then wraps up the show seemingly on its own.

Rhythms

Let’s jump to rhythms, because it brings us most directly back to the questions of the previous chapter. And rather than answering them, it throws us in the deep end again. Let’s start with a peculiar example: walking. Of course, this whole book hinges on the effects of upright posture, but strikingly little attention is given, until now, to the questions of balance and walking. The point Leroi-Gourhan wants to make is that the rhythm of walking for the human biped actually poses a problem of rhythmic integration. He wants to say that the treading motion of walking governs spatiotemporal integration in the social sphere, but the peculiar situation of the human is that this is accompanied by the rhythmic movement of the arms, which has to do with form-creating. (310) Thus space-time and the capture of volume are related but distinct rhythmic modes. Again, he moves fast and loose here, and its hard to say exactly what is going on. Musical rhythm seems linked to walking, time, and space, while technical rhythm transforms nature itself into instruments. And so we wind up with this rather odd formulation: 

Music, dance, theater, lived and mimed social situations, belong to the imagination—to the projection upon reality of a light that humanizes the zoological processes of human situations. They are the clothing in which we dress our social and interpersonal behavior, obeying the most general biological rules; they are the intimate property of language as opposed to manual technicity. Technical rhythm has not imagination, it does not humanize behaviour but only raw matter. (310) 

Rather than just write this off as a crass binary, we might remember that it is precisely the balance between these that functional aesthetics gives us a way of playing with. If, as he is insisting, we are living through the age of an “almost total mechanicity” we do not solve it through “art for art’s sake.” In fact, he seems to be saying, we need an aesthetics of the functional. 

A balance as constant as the one that from the earliest times has coordinated the respective roles of figurative representation and technical activity cannot, it seems, be disturbed without putting in jeopardy the very sense of the human adventure. (311)