General Discussion : The "Stop Hijacking the Community Wisdom Thread" Thread

Sure, if you want to take a step back and refocus, I'm down.

Question: What will lead to producing great writing?

Oh good, let's start with the easy questions :)

But there actually was a straight-forward and simple answer to this question, once upon a time. We have just broadly rejected that answer for the past 100-150 years, on various grounds, for both good and ill. And we could talk about it (I'm sure I won't be able to resist referring to it further myself) but rather than opine a nostalgia for an education system we never had, I agree we should tackle this question as contemporarily as possible, with the tools we do have.

While, we can use art for examples, let us try to use writing examples. If our question is for writers, let us use writers as models, as much as possible. Or at least make sure the analogy definitely ties back into writing.

Sure... I'll certainly try. I must admit to a slight phenomenological (drink) tendency (as I'm sure you can tell from my last rambling post) that I tend to follow my insights where they lead, and then work backwards from there to find relevance. But I'm sure between us we can find suitable literary examples to support our arguments.

I would like to remove the aspect of the audience from the argument, or the reception it receives. For now...

Well... okay. I can go with you on this to a point. Especially if we're trying to steer away from discussions of enjoyment or utilitarian notions... which I think we should. But I feel I have to point out that art in general (and this goes doubly for writing specifically) is conventional. It only has meaning in context, and that context is necessarily cultural.

This isn't to say that there is nothing interesting to say about the artist's work in isolation of its context, or indeed that we haven't already said some interesting things along these lines. But this is no small concession for our discussion to follow.

And indeed, it feels like we are already going to overrun that line before we've even gotten to this first batch of questions, just by keeping our guiding principle in mind: What will lead to producing great writing? Great for what? Great in comparison to what? These are perhaps even more basic questions that we may have to tackle first, especially if we can't refer to the culture that produced the work. And if you want to restrict this (at least for now) to just the artist and their relationship to the work, we aren't left with much to work with. I suppose we could refer to the artist's judgment, or we could try to find some objective things to say about the work itself... but both of these are problematic in the long run. It seems we either end up prioritizing authorial intent, or trying to derive oughts from is's.

Or we have to untangle the audience from the culture... which could be interesting, but it feels a little far afield from our discussion so far.

Why is a love for words not enough?

What else must we have?

For being a great writer? Well, I suppose for the same reasons that a love of food is not enough for being a great chef. Or love of baseball is not enough to be a great baseball player. So... lots of things. And I'm not opposed to trying to enumerate some of these things, but this feels like a moving target, and possibly (depending on the level of resolution we're looking at this from) an infinite list. But if you have some things in mind, I'll certainly give some input.

Do we have any firm examples? Or must we only work at a meta-level for now?

Well, if we reject the artist's claims that love of words is necessary (and by the same move would also have to reject examples of writers who say love of words is unnecessary), and we reject our own, and other people's response to works (as we're still bracketing off audience response and cultural inferences) then I'm not sure what other evidence we could point at. But the problem with relegating this to a 'meta-level' question is that it makes it functionless. We may indeed create a beautifully cogent, concise, complete system for describing how to produce great writing, but if it doesn't actually refer to anything in the world, then it doesn't actually refer to anything in the world. Do you have any suggestions of what we could use as examples?

What is great writing?

Again, this is a value judgment. So either it's teleological (great for something), or it's inferred culturally (great compared to something)... or likely both. I mean it is the million dollar question, and I hope we can get to it at some point, but with the stipulations we are establishing, we may not be able to talk about it yet.

All of this is going to force me to do a shit-ton of research and I haven't taken a literary theory course, so this is going to be painful.

Here's something to get you started: Paul Fry's Intro to Lit Theory Survey Course, with reading lists in the course materials. And it may be painful for you... it was pointed out to me that Fry's voice is similar to Don Knotts, and now I can't unhear it. So I guess it would depend on how you feel about Mr. Furley, as now I have done the same for you :)

I see my biggest flaw will be taking bits and pieces of different philosophy to try and create something cogent (drink).

It would ill behoove me to criticize this approach, being so near to my own... except for the end goal of something cogent. Philosophical projects are (for me at least) best understood as tools for investigation, analysis, and interrogating the world. So I don't foresee, or even desire, an end result of a cogent whole comprised of all these disparate and often contradictory parts. So if your 'something cogent' is like a toolbox, then great. I have no concerns for that at all. But if your 'something cogent' is like a meta-multi-tool, some single device that can contend with the infinitude of issues the world presents for us... I suspect you may run into problems.

And all of this is contingent on you actually wanting to delve into the depths of this entire holy-fuck (drink).

Well, you are certainly not going to ward me off with tales of how deep this may go. As long as the conversation is as interesting and cordial as we have both been able to be so far, I'll continue with you. Indeed, I fully expect these depths to be bottomless.

but if you're game, the question has been asked. OR, we can just ramble on and see what sticks?

Both!

something I picked up from Arthur C. Danto's What Is Art?

Ah, I do enjoy reading Danto... "less a case of the mimesis of vacuity than the vacuity of mimesis..." An auspicious (re)beginning.

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of where our first analogy/thought experiment succeeds and fails, let's take a moment to put out the fire and pick up some of this mess and look at what has actually happened. An argument has fallen. And you didn't even wait for me to come and push it... shame on you, stealing all my fun :)

Often I find arguments fall because there wasn't enough to support it, and I suspect in this case, there wasn't enough to support the argument because we have already cut off one of its legs before we even began. And I'll endeavor to have an argument for this for you to pick apart at some point, but at least for now; consider that the reason we can't talk about great writing without referring to audience reception, is because we can't talk about "greatness" at all without referring to someone's reception. Now I'll try to convince you that this also goes for "artness" in general and "writing" in particular... but for now, yes, let's bracket [greatness] away with audience reception and tackle them more fully later.

Now I do like Danto's essay as an analogy, despite its weaknesses, which I'll try to point out, but I think as a matter of sticking to literary examples, three immediately came to mind... perhaps not coincidentally all by Borges: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, The Library of Babel, and The Secret Miracle. I think all of these are available in the Labyrinths collection, and maybe also in Ficciones, if not randomly searchable online; should you desire a refresher. Not to say you should reread these works to continue this discussion... but you probably should to continue being a writer :) And I will be talking with little concern for spoilers about them later, so in case you haven't yet... spoiler alert. Borges also strikes me as similar to Nietzsche in a way; able to say more in a single line than others could in entire books.

When I say weakness in reference to the essay, I mean primarily weakness as an analogy. The essay is fine, though he probably, if had more space, could have gone into how intentional acts of "meaninglessness" are still intentional acts, and so carry meaning, but that's not necessary for our current problems with the analogy. The weakness as an analogy comes from two points: each item in his exhibition is unique, and each item in his exhibition is art. You'll note in his conclusion:

Now everything in my collection is a work of art, but nothing has been clarified as to what has been achieved. The nature of the boundary is philosophically dark, despite the success of J’s raid. [emphasis added]

"Now" everything is... he spent half the essay arguing against it, but he eventually has to accept J's contribution. We're not happy about it, but we have to acquiesce. And you're right to pick up on this as being a matter of authorial intent, such that despite J's work having none of the traditional intents we'd see in a portrait, or a landscape, or even in minimalism or found-art objects, it still qualifies as having intent. And so at least as long as that boundary is philosophically dark, we can't disqualify J's contribution as art, at least not without disqualifying Duchamp.

But notice the difference in emphasis between the Danto essay and our thought-experiment. The portrait is different from the landscape, is different from the minimalist work, is different from the found-art object, is different from the incomplete "Conversazione Sacra" and from the still-life. His emphasis throughout is that despite the differences being indescernable (or more accurately immaterial), they are still different works of art. While in our experiment, despite them having different origins, they are all they same Sunset Limited. Where because each work in Danto's exhibition has a different origin, it is its own work of art, but because each Sunset Limited has a different origin, we claim only one is a work of art. We use the same argument to come to the opposite conclusion? That strikes me as a problem in the analogy.

And to make this point stronger, consider that Danto has already included our examples in his exhibition. What is J's contribution but a forgery? He saw the work on the wall and copied it, nothing more. And what is our computer generated Sunset Limited but a found-art object like the last piece in Danto's original exhibition? He found his red square and picked it because of its similarity to the other works, and we searched through the computer output to find the one most like Sunset Limited. And though tenuously and obscurely, Danto qualifies both his found-object and forgery as art. So why don't we?

So the first problem with our thought experiment is just that; if we can't tell them apart, then we can't disqualify a forgery or computer generated play as not being art until we can say why a forgery or computer generated play doesn't count as art in the first place. We can't simply take that as a given.

The second problem is because Sunset Limited is a play. Which is mostly just a matter of making the thought experiment more complicated than necessary. Because plays are meant to be staged, and there are strong arguments that a play is not complete until performed. So if we don't address that, then McCarthy's "original" copy of Sunset Limited doesn't qualify as art either, because it hasn't been performed. Even more complicated because plays often run for multiple performances (so which performance is the 'original' and which are merely copies of the original performance, or are they all only forgeries of the text as written?) and this play was also made into a movie. Is the movie merely a forgery of the play? If so, is it a forgery of the play as written or as performed? Or is each and every instance of Sunset Limited a unique work, qualified as its own work of art even if they are materially indistinguishable? Does a half-breath's difference in the delivery of a single line of the play between two otherwise identical performances count as qualitatively different/materially distinguishable?

This isn't to say we can't address some of this at some point, but thought experiments are meant to be simplistic to clearly point out implications, so perhaps we should pick something slightly less complicated... like Blood Meridian. But you'll notice that we still have at least one problem when we come to forgeries... is my copy of Blood Meridian a forgery and so, not [great] writing? Is your copy? Is the copy in my local library merely a forgery, or any of the copies in the library of congress (I know at one time it required multiple copies to secure a copyright, though I don't know if that policy has changed) or any of the copies at Random House? Is Albert Erskine's copy? Does only the Blood Meridian that McCarthy penned (presuming he writes long-hand because that's simpler than qualifying which copy on his computer is the original) [great] writing or art? Not the version he got back edited by Erskine? Not the version he got back after line edits? Not the galley he approved or the ARC before the cover was decided on? Not the full final 1st edition, 1st print run I presume authors still get a copy of?

If the only Blood Meridian that counts as art, or even [great] writing, is the one that McCarthy has, then how do we know that Blood Meridian is [great] writing? I've never seen McCarthy's copy. I will probably never see it, much less read it.

But, I belabor the point. I'm sure you got where I was going. That is a particular difficulty that comes with writing though, which is not so problematic for visual arts (and only slightly less problematic for performing arts) because of how literature is disseminated/conveyed/performed/audienced. The difference in my reading of the last edition of Blood Meridian from a reading of the first edition, is not really qualitative. Certainly less so than the difference between seeing a picture of Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond on the internet and sitting in front of the 6x41 foot beast of oil and canvas at MoMA. And if we are still bracketing out my response to the work as an audience, the work itself is not qualitatively different, unlike the difference between oil and canvas vs. jpeg.

Enough of that for now... what do we agree on?

Is [great] writing a product of authorial intent? Yes. I would never argue against the necessity of authorial intent, only against its sufficiency or primacy. I think Danto makes a [great] argument for the inclusion of authorial intent, as does Borges in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The only thing that separates the two versions of Don Quixote is the intents of the two authors... yet it strikes us (or at least the narrator) as a palpable thing. And, this will also be relevant for the computer-generated case, we are human. We like human things. There comes a point where that really is the only justification we can use. We want human activity in the world to be important, so we call it important, and we treat it importantly. But we also know the dangers of saying human things are the only important or even most important things. Writing and art is no different.

Is [great] writing the product of random processes? No. This is why I like The Library of Babel example. As Borges points out, in the realm of the truly infinite, knowledge is destroyed. We could never find Sunset Limited or Blood Meridian amid a truly infinite catalogue of works. Or at least if we could, it would take infinity to do so. Even with the help of computers (notice that 256bit encryption takes 6 times the life of the universe to break, and they're not even close to infinitely long or variable.) But I would also say that natural processes also cannot produce art. A mountain may be beautiful, but it is not art. And actually if we listen to Kant, it isn't beautiful either, it's sublime. We don't need to suppose an infinitely computatative machine to randomly spit out McCarthy knock-offs. We can also suppose, like pictures of Jesus in cheese-toast or burls of trees or apple cores, clearly unintentional resemblances to meaningful/intentional work, do not confer meaning. At worst, we don't see the resemblance at all, or we simply say it was a coincidence. It means nothing. Because what is the difference between a computer randomly spitting out Blood Meridian and purposefully spitting out Blood Meridian because McCarthy told it to? Does this mean my copy of Blood Meridian, which only superficially resembles the work McCarthy wrote doesn't count? I want to say no. Just that whatever value we ascribe to authorial intent (and perhaps more generally to 'art' and 'writing') does not exist in the book itself.

Note though that I don't refer to 'accident'. I think [great] writing, as an act of exploration and experimentation requires 'accidents'. But to get into a situation where an accident could occur, and what to do with such accidents requires intentionality in the course of artistic endeavor.

Is [great] writing dependent on reception? No... but I would change that to "determined by reception". We have to remember that the author is also an audience for their own work. Even the author saying, "this is or isn't a [great] work" is audience reception. The only way to cut out audience reception entirely (as you seem so intent on doing) is for each artist to wholly create/originate not just the artwork, but the artform... and then also "art" itself. As in The Secret Miracle, it is a work that has only one audience member, the playwright himself... And though we will never know, I believe Borges when he says that this play, which will never be seen or even written down, is a masterpiece. But it is still a play. And we know it is a play because we know what plays are. Not because I invented "plays" or because plays exude some noticible quality of "playness", but because I was told, by my culture, what plays are and I make a comparison. We know what novels are because we have read other novels, and really because someone told us what novels are. We know when we see art because we compare it to other art we know, which we know because someone told us what art is. This goes for both audiences and artists. And while either, and/or both, can be wrong in the estimation of value [greatness, artness, writingness] of a particular work; someone has to make that initial inference: this is a play, this is a novel, this is art... even 'this is something completely different/new' can only be true if we compare it to all the things it is not (which is actually how all semiotic systems work). The valuation can be varying degrees of accurate (though even that phrasing has problems) and is ultimately supplemental to the work itself, but the comparison is necessary. Even before the piece is complete, this is already at work in the writer, is already a comparison to what has come before.

Cultural inference (you'll also note that I shy away from your term "audience reception" but I think the two are for this purpose somewhat interchangeable) works alongside authorial intent, they are both necessary, and I would go further and say that neither is paramount. You can't intend a [great] novel without inferring "the novel" from the stack of pages with writing on them. You can't infer "novelness" without the author's intention as expressed in a stack of pages with writing on them. A stack of pages with writing on them is meaningless without an artist/audience, or audience/artist working with them.

Now I've gone on plenty long enough... and though probably not a complete argument, I think I've given enough pieces of one that you could start to take it apart. I can see two controversial (if not outright broken) pieces to my claims, but I'd like to see if you can find something I don't.

@Thuggish: Glad to have you along.

You have ruined my plans.

Oh... I can't help but feel I've deprived you the pleasure of playing your trap card :) Not to worry, there will be further opportunities. But keep in mind (and I only bring this up because it's a point that will become highly relevant later) what we would have learned if I had defeated your self-defeat. What was actually "measured" in that case? Would that have proved the initial argument true? Or would that have only proved your counter insufficient? Or would that have only proved my inability to argue effectively?

As an aside; I am not immune to leaning towards self-aggrandizement: there are no laurels for besting weak arguments, and I won't deny that as a possible motivation here. But for me, the best outcome would be that we build something together that we both agree on, and I try to not champion ideas even I can poke holes in. So I want your argument to be strong and not won through rhetorical trickery in case it too should become my argument. Or if we still disagree, it would at least be an argument worth trying to knock over.

That is, if one were to think about every aspect before they begin, the artist would never begin, thus at some point the artist must just go and figure it out along the way. There is no possible way to plan out every aspect. This means that authorial intent is still, at best, a vague term.

Well, perhaps it would be useful to think of authorial intent as on an asymptote curve, never quite reaching either the axis of absolute certainty nor of complete randomness. I can certainly see arguments claiming that different artistic movements or forms or works pushing these boundaries (Pollack paintings and aleatoric music pushing one way, Kubrick films and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk pushing the other.) So instead of a binary, intent or not, art or not, sort of question, it becomes (at least for the extreme cases) more about testing that boundary. How meticulous and exacting can it be and still be art? How free and unstructured can it be and still be art? Or, to stick to our commitment to literary examples; the difference between the ghazal or villanelle (Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night), and free-verse/experimental (Howl).

So, if you will allow that we have three works that cannot be distinguished,

Yeah, I don't mind adjusting the thought-experiment in this way, though be careful with the word 'distinguished'. I ran into the same difficulty with 'discernible'. In establishing the experiment we have already discerned between the works, we have already distinguished them. We have already presupposed that there is a knowable difference between the works that should influence their values, even if it is not a material difference. And that our system will be able to account for that difference, even if we can't. I think it will be the "even if we can't" that is going to cause us the most trouble.

And I do like where the experiment is going... though I'd be careful with some of the phrasing of it (the New Critics are screaming at us... I'll get to that in a bit) but let us see what we actually achieved/measured. Perhaps I can use an analogy to clarify what I mean...

And since you are not using your supercomputer anymore, I'll reprogram it to read literature and then tell us if it was [great] or not. Right now it's a rather simple device (The last time I took an organized computer programming course... well, back in my day... once upon a command line... Pascal, alright! I learned  to program in Pascal. You happy!?!)  but it is modular, so we are free to make whatever adjustments will help us in the future. I think this is an apt metaphor for what we are doing.

The way the experiment was initially set up, it only measured two things: material form/content and authorial intent. And actually, we're still waiting on the module to tell the computer how to measure form (though it looks like we might be getting a module from I.A. Richards any day now and I look forward to opening that up and tinkering with it with you in the future) so we have instead flipped a switch on the back that turns the MFC algorithm (material form/content) to the "art" position automatically. So far, we've only been testing the AI algorithm (cute how that worked out), and we've run into a problem. We've fed in our three versions of Sunset Limited and it told us they were all "art". So we tried tweaking the AI algorithm, and then it called all of them "not art".

Now there are a few different conclusions we could draw from this and a few different directions we can go from here. And this is one of the fundamental questions Lit Theorists have been asking and arguing over for the past 400 years. We can even expand our analogy to generalize some of the major positions that have been taken so far: The New Critics have a very articulate and complicated MFC algorithm, but basically leave the AI switch in the "art" position; the Russian Formalists have a single, integrated MFCAI algorithm; the Structuralists have basically taken the AI module out altogether, replacing it with "The Poem", "The Novel", "The Short Story" modules depending on what work they are putting in it... while the Historical, Personal Identity and Psychological perspectives all tend to have very intricate AI modules, and rely on the MFC module less, sometimes just leaving it as a switch as we have so far. Of course, this is a broad generalization and these positions are much more nuanced (and well-argued) than my description.

But presuming my description of what we've done so far is accurate, the conclusion you've drawn doesn't seem to follow:

I think because of this, we must know origin, and we must know intent, before we can provide a verdict on which is actually art.

Because our still very rough AI module doesn't tell us anything useful, reliable, or consistent about works that are materially identical, we have to know authorial intent before we can even begin? All we have been measuring so far is authorial intent. We could just as easily say, "Since we can't make meaningful distinctions about authorial intent with materially identical works, perhaps authorial intent isn't important at all." Instead, we now have to manually flip that switch to "art" or "not art" before we put the work in the computer so it can tell us if it is art or not...

We can go in this direction if you want, but it is literally the definition of appealing to authorial intent. (This is why all the formalists are screaming at us.) And what do you think this system is going to tell us about the work if we already have to assume its status as art or not before we let it analyze the work? Well, we can call this a sort of threshold measure; Sunset Limited must meet the threshold of legitimate authorial intent before we can go further... but how do we know authorial intent? If the three versions got mixed up by the courier in route, and we knew one was McCarthy's, one was Pierre Menard's, and one was from the Library of Babel, but we don't know which was which, how do we tell the computer? Would McCarthy know which one he wrote? Do we believe Pierre Menard when he tells us his justification for his intent, or do we maybe consider he only read Borges's justification for his earlier book and is now parroting that to us?

And I'm all for having a much more nuanced definition of authorial intent (hence my asymptote) and I'm all for having it play a role in analysis, even possibly a necessary one... but if all we really have to go on is the text itself (and again, many schools of thought say so) how do we get authorial intent out of the text? The danger of going in this direction is that we stop analyzing literature, and are only analyzing either what author's claim to be their intents, or what we claim to qualify as intent. If we hold intent as being an a priori distinction, all we are measuring is what works we put in the computer or not; as far as authorial intent is concerned, we are measuring ourselves, not literature.

We must say all are excluded until more information can be gathered.

Good... well, I mean the conservative approach is fine, if not without its own complications, but good for needing more information. We need to measure more than authorial intent. Origin? Maybe, but I feel that is probably closely tied in with intent, so I'm not entirely sure they're even two different things. But it's a place to start, sure. What else? Intent, origin, form...

Much like a copy of a Monet vs the actual Monet. But they do have the ability to introduce people to the work. Yes, it is very different to actually see it than only see it on a screen.

Right, but my point was this is a material difference. The difference between a painting on a wall and a jpg on my computer of a painting on a wall is is not the same difference as between my copy of Blood Meridian and McCarthy's copy of Blood Meridian. Though it could be the difference (or at least similar to the difference) between the script for Sunset Limited and Sunset Limited performed on stage.

But if we parse out this "copy" problem (and I think it will be helpful to remember our guiding principle "what will lead to producing great writing") what is the nature of the difference in my copy and how does that lessen the value from McCarthy's original? Did McCarthy somehow put less great writing into my copy than he put into his? No, that doesn't feel right. Did McCarthy put less authorial intent into my copy than his original? Well, maybe, but in order to justify that we have to define what authorial intent is and what its relationship is to great writing. We can't just leave it as a vague term. And it feels like we are building an answer to our guiding principle of "What leads to producing great writing is not publishing, because copies are only lesser versions of your original work. So if you publish, you are, by definition, producing not great writing." Which I suppose is a shot in the arm for publishers... let them worry about producing the facsimiles of great writing, and writers can focus on the great writing part... but then what about all the great writing that doesn't get produced at all because the first book tanked and now no one will publish us and we all have to get real jobs to pay the rent? I mean, it seems an accurate description of the world, but it doesn't seem to have answered much about how to produce great writing in the first place. It just firmly entrenches the established publishing house as the gatekeepers.

And notice what has slipped in the back door because we were so concentrated on authorial intent... If the texts are identical such that even the author can't tell the difference between them, and we still maintain that authorial intent is necessary for determining value, where does that value exist? If it's not in the text, and it's not in the author...

There is no teleological thing for each person to say that this is great.

You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means... And I'm only half kidding at this point. If you're going to keep using that word, you're going to have to define what you mean by it, because:

A person would only respond with an automatic like if the work somehow reminded them of something in their own life, or showed them a new way to look at something in their own life.

is giving the telos for each person's response. If I put these two quotes together, you've said, "There is no purpose for people to give to justify their response. And here are two purposes people can give to justify their response: it reminds them of their own life, or shows them something new." I'm not opposed to using this as a metric, but just because you keep saying it isn't teleological, doesn't mean it's not teleological. If you want this argument to be non-teleological then we just have to give up on purpose and intention. But I don't think you want to do that... and I don't really want to do that either. And I think this will actually cause us a bit of a problem later on when we get to Oscar Wilde... but until then, we should stop using that word. My cirrhosis is having little baby cirrhoses of its own.

(god, I feel like I'm influenced by facebook.)

Well, as for this survey project in general... I get the feeling that you see there are already problems with it, but to get you headed in the right direction, replace "points" and "likes" with "dollars" and "sales". At the very least, we aren't embarking on a new way of thinking about this. But what I see as the real concern for this (yes, even more so than the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey-sized holes in there somewhere) is what are we measuring... again. Especially if we want to say "there are no reasons for the audience's choice, it will just spontaneously arise from shared common values" that is a huge assumption to make. It would seem that if "shared cultural values" was a strong a determiner as you want it to be, we wouldn't need to poll this at all. We wouldn't need to study why Twilight was so popular, because we would share the cultural values that prompted them to choose 'like' in the first place. The only reason we have to ask if someone liked the work is because we don't share all our cultural values. So if we can get a large population to agree on whether they like a work, are we measuring the work, or are we measuring what values they share? Now these are good and important and interesting questions, but they don't seem to be the ones we're trying to ask. "What will lead to producing great writing is appealing to largest share of common culture" isn't really a new or interesting way to look at this problem. Indeed, I would say it is just this mode of thinking that leads our culture to say Twilight is the definition of great writing. Not just an unavoidable outlier, but a prime example of great writing (it got an awful lot of 'likes' after all). And if you are happy with that outcome, fine... but it doesn't seem like you are.

This also ignores the difficulty in establishing if we even are measuring shared cultural norms in the first place. Maybe the story does remind the audience of their lives, and they hate it because of that. Maybe the story does teach them something new and they hate it because of that. Maybe the story had the word 'masticate' in it, so they hate it because of that. Or maybe they like the work because the author has a nice smile... or because the dog in the story didn't get hurt and they like dogs, and they were really afraid that the dog would get hurt cause you never know these days, some authors would hurt a dog in the story and call it "artistic", but this was a good book because the dog didn't get hurt. (Although that reasoning does have a certain cathartic quality to it...)

And you've already started on this road, but it would mean that all chinese literature is better than english literature (or spanish or french or german or japanese or all the ancient languages put together) simply because they can get more people to agree (or disagree) based purely on population that has access to the work.

But I think these are the problems we are always going to run into as long as we depend on a utilitarian definition of audience reception. Indeed it seems like we are going to keep running into these kinds of problems as long as we keep trying to treat each facet of this question in isolation, or at least as discretely determinative.

@Thuggish:

It's too soon to tell. And while I appreciate Diaz's vote of confidence, the whole point of having an argument is to find out. It all sounds nice and reasonable in our heads (our own ideas always do) but we can't tell if they are actually any good until we take them out and show them to other people... and we have to be prepared to find out that we don't know what we are talking about.  

Oooh... this thread is hopping.

• On the Topology of Artistic Analysis:

Let's make it a cube, and hold three sides for cultural factors.

Let me just say, I very much like this new idea. I was playing with a similar concept myself just before I read your version. But as an analogy for this project, I agree this works, in some ways, much better than our computer model with switches and algorithms. A sort of topology of artistic analysis, if you will.

I do think however, there are a couple places you are going to run into problems with your stated goals, so let me build on this concept a bit.

My first point is a minor one about the scale we're using and its implications. You've chosen a probabilistic scale from 0 to 1, while I would prefer a geometric scale which isn't inherently closed. I think either could work, but the geometric scale does something naturally that we'd have to make special considerations for in a probabilistic setting. And I may have tipped this in the wrong direction initially in referring to asymptotes specifically, but let me try to explain. Probabilistic points are fixed at 0 and 1, while geometric axes are by nature infinite. And what I am concerned about would be something like the Flynn Effect.

Let's say we're back in Elizabethan England, and have one of Shakespeare's Sonnets and we're inputting its data points into the model it scores particularly high on some (perhaps even poetry-specific) measure like rhyme scheme... Now we fast-forward a couple hundred years and we come across Shelley's "Ozymandias" and we want to say this is a great sonnet but the rhyme scheme is different. There are plenty of arguments we could make for how we would score it in comparison to Shakespeare, but let's presume a positive outlook and say that art can "progress" in a way, so we want to say Shelley's difference actually makes it a little bit better and so we score it higher. And this would be fine if there is no limit, but now we're pushing up against 1... presuming we're reserving 1 for some platonic idealization that could only be sullied by actually existing, But essentially the top score in this scale is the same as 1 anyway, Shakespeare's .9 a placeholder for 1 until Shelley shows up with his .99. And then e.e.cummings shows up with "The Cambridge Ladies" a hundred years later and we want to say this is a great sonnet but again the rhyme is different, but we're feeling generous so Cummings is now .999.

Yes, this system could essentially go on for infinity, but it does seem to become quite unwieldy quite quickly. And maybe I'm presuming optimism, but if the whole goal is "what leads to the production of great writing" then we should be getting better, and it makes more intuitive sense to continue to add up to an infinity (that admittedly can't be reached) than to continually divide the distances up to a 1 (that also admittedly can't be reached.) And what's more, having the system codified gives insight for new writers into what they will be aiming for in their work... i.e. they know what's going to be on the test... therefore, Flynn Effect, whether we're particularly generous or not.

But I mostly posit this change in scale in deference to your desire for objectivity. If we allow the metrics to continue to grow, as through time I can only assume it will, then we will not have to shift particular inputs... as you've already had to do. If you put in a Shakespeare work and score it .78, and at some point later you put it in and it score .99, then you have failed to create an objective system. If Shakespeare is a .78, and your work is .98 below Shakespeare, then your work is -.2 and you need a scale that accounts for that. If his work is .78 then it is .78 no matter who does it. And likewise, if your work is .26 then that's what it is. To allow for the type of relativism that says "Shakespeare's work is clearly better than mine, let's move both scores to reflect their relative value" although I grant your tendency toward self-deprecation, is not an objective one. The best you can allow for would be to say, "Shakespeare's works are .98 better than mine... we need to re-way the works, rebalancing how the works are scored." That means everyone's scores will likely change because we measured them incorrectly the first time. Which is fine, we all make mistakes. But then you have to remeasure all the works. Every time you run into this problem.

Now you may be tempted to fight against this because it seems to say that over time, we will no longer consider Shakespeare great. Many other works will accrue scores higher than Shakespeare on any side of the polyhedron, and someday someone may even score higher on all sides (*cough*Beckett*cough*). And if you maintain that "greatness" is merely a factor of the "volume" of the polyhedron (as an aggregate of all sides) then you have to accept this. But, perhaps consider that 'greatness' is not about absolute volume but relative volume. Volume as a ratio to its sides more equally distributed (how near equilateral the polyhedron is) or volume as a change over previously established limits to maximum volume: before Shakespeare the highest score was .68, but Shakespeare increased that by .1 and a 10% increase in value is "greatness" no matter what the absolute volumes of the polyhedrons. Or both, Shakespeare's well-formed octohedron is 'greater' than Marlowe's lopsided tetrahedron.

For me, this is what we already do. We may not conceptualize it as abstract polyhedrons (and we almost certainly don't have well-defined mathematical scales to measure them), but we do abstract away from all the works we read and engage with. Often times our abstractions are very simple (binary even): "I liked it" or "this isn't captivating". When we engage with the work more fully we will have more complex abstractions (linear): "the use of meter and rhythm is excellent" or "the characters are all very shallow." And when we specialize in schools of analysis, we abstract even more complexly (multi-dimensional): "the antagonist's over-reliance of plosives in his speech patterns reinforces his volatile and explosive personality and foreshadows the over-use of dynamite that causes the cave-in at the end of act 2, which is typical (if not even cliché) of late 19th-century writers."

What I like about it, is that simultaneously we are also building these models for "great writing" or "art". We are given our first exposures to "great writing", in our day this is typically in school, and there are numerous reasons for each of our idiosyncratic shapes of it. We don't all read the same things in school (I never had classes on Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby and came to them both later in life) we all have different teachers and that can influence how we shape our models (it took a great teacher to get me interested in Beowulf, and I don't remember a single thing from one teacher I particularly disliked.. which turns out to be mostly Hawthorne and Irving), or we have difficulties reading to overcome (ADHD, dyslexia, being a teenager) or social pressures...

The point being, that not only do I have a different measure/model of Heart of Darkness, I also have a different measure/model of "great writing" and they both inform each other. I know how good Heart of Darkness is because I compare it to my model of great writing, and I know what great writing is because I have built it out of the analyzed components of works like Heart of Darkness. Here again is another way to measure "greatness" in a work, if it forces me to expand my previously held model of "greatness" to include it, then it is 'greater' than work that merely falls within already established artistic space.

You are right, though, that we have to start somewhere. Again, usually in school. But at some point, we stop relying on the authority of our culture to make those determinations for us. And as a culture, we have done that as a whole... somewhat schizophrenically perhaps, but the bottom line is we do not have a culturally agreed upon model for "art" or "great writing"... but have culturally agreed that we do not want one. We had classical models that we held as great (and often still do) have torn them down, and we have rebuilt on those ruins, and have torn those down as well... we're now at a place where we say, "well, ruins are nice too." And they are.

This is already getting quite long, but here's the most important take-away: The reason we don't have an "objective" ground for determining the value of "artistic greatness" any longer, is because people started to dig for it. What objective grounds we had have been undermined by the search for objectivity.

That doesn't mean we're wrong to do so. The search itself has value. And it has been a fruitful search: we don't get The Zoo Story, Endgame, The Importance of Being Earnest, What the Butler Saw, or Friends if Hamlet just is objectively the greatest. But it also doesn't mean there is anything there to find. Remember Aristotle's answer to Plato; the artistic endeavor isn't about what is there, it's about what could be there. You can't ground "could be" in "is", even it is is informed and framed by it, but it only is "could be there" because it isn't what "is there".

• On Teleology and Oscar Wilde:

​I'm still struggling with your use of 'teleology'. 

I wholeheartedly believe that there is no purpose or end other than that which we create for ourselves, as individuals and as a society.

Right. But that is the definition of teleology.

Telos, meaning end or purpose. It is a judgment concerning an object the possibility of which can only be grasped from the point of view of its purpose.

To judge an art object as art, is only possible(or rather meaningful) from the point of view of its purpose; to be an art object. To be the product of an authorial intent. This is why we reject the computer copy of Sunset Limited, because a computer is not an intentional agent. It cannot give telos. It does not intend. The computer copy is non-teleological, therefore not art. The natural process is non-teleological, therefore not art. The forgery is teleological, but for a purpose we want to disqualify as artistic, so still not art. McCarthy's original is artistically teleological, therefore, art. If McCarthy were unintentionally laying out random words, and just so happened to produce something resembling Sunset Limited amid an infinity of ungrammatical nonsense, we'd probably conclude it's not art because it lacks the authorial intention we want to maintain as necessary for art. (Though in this last case we could merely say that McCarthy is not an artistic writer, but an artistic reader and pulling out Sunset Limited from the nonsense is an artistically intentional act and so part of his process, throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks kind of thing...)

The only way I can make sense of your insistence of saying this is non-teleological is if you are trying to say "Art does not intend itself." Which is true, but meaningless. Firstly, because no one is arguing that art intends itself. But mostly because the definitions of both art (as we've been muddling through it) and teleology preclude abstract non-agents. If authorial intent is necessary to perform a judgment on a work of art, as a work of art (which you still maintain), then that is the point of view we must partake in to grasp its purpose. "What did the author intend?" If you say this is non-teleological, you are saying it doesn't matter what the author's intentions are. You are saying art is spontaneously generated from natural, unintended processes. Non-teleological art means mountains are art.

Now, I may still be missing the point you're trying to make, so perhaps you can give an example. If art is non-teleological, what is something that is teleological?

The reason I brought up Oscar Wilde is because he points out that "All art is quite useless." And I mention that it will cause us problems because if we are stumbling so much around 'intention' and 'purpose', imagine what will happen when we try to include 'useless'. And I think he's right.

• On the Object/Subject debate

​I've gone on long enough, and you all seem to be having enough fun with all this without me, so I'll just make a couple quick points that I think need to be made:

You have no evidence that it is only subjective

Actually, all evidence is subjective. So we can't even get objective evidence to say say it would objective in the first place. And what evidence we do have, also points to it being subjective. Objects do not study themselves, or measure themselves, or compare themselves. All evidence comes through a necessarily subjective point of view.

Obviously, we need for all art to be rendered by a device designed to include chaotic alterations into every iteration.

Like our brains, right? But I agree, we mostly need to just stop freaking out about subjectivity. Subjective is not a null value.

You call it subjective, fine. The burden of proof is now in your court.

Well, that's not how burden of proof works, but most importantly we don't have to prove it, because you've been carving out the space for the subjective nature of this endeavor from the very beginning. An author is a subject. If the author's subjective point of view is necessary for the determination of art in an art object, then art is subjective. It doesn't matter how well-defined, objective, or rigorous our models are, if we input subjective data into the model, it is a subjective assessment. Otherwise we could just let the computer do its objective thing, and every copy of Sunset Limited is just as much art, or not, as every other copy because there is no objective difference between them.

Is it fair to claim the questions over "greatness" come down to the relatively rudimentary problem of qualitative vs quantitative evaluation?

Oh, indeed. And many schools of thought have argued both sides... even (perhaps especially) to what counts as qualitative or quantitative in the realms of literature. It is striking to me, though, that none really do adhere to a stricly quantitative model. They leave that to the linguists and philologists... but I find facets of language like this quite fascinating. Like adverb emphasis and usage in particular speakers over others, or how slang/dialect/pidgin develops or Zipf's Law. These are things that can be spoken of with some degree of objectivity, but we don't really talk about these things when talking about "greatness" of writing.

What sort of scaling system one might employ depends on what is being scaled, no?

This was one of the Structuralist's big points. It doesn't do to hold poetry to the same measures as novels or short stories or psalms. Now we don't have to hold to the divisions they established, but I do think we have to account for that, as well as "do we measure 'character development' along the same scale as 'imagery/metapor use'?"

The brain is the bugbear.

You ain't just whistlin' Dixie.

So let's just call it subjective already.

As an addendum... and also so Diaz doesn't think I'm merely picking on his argument... this also isn't the answer. Saying "It's just subjective, so stop arguing about it." is the same mistake as "Once we have the objective answer, we can stop arguing about it." Arguing about it is the point.

 This is something I think Alexander Nehamas was trying to do in his work

I have not read this one, and it looks very interesting, so I'll be adding it to my list. I like the idea of the philospher living a particular kind of life of thinking, versus the job of the philosopher is to think about stuff. Similarly for the artist and writer. Plus, I've been meaning to get a better handle on Montaigne.

But now that you've agreed with me... I feel the need to say something contentious. (And you can psychoanalyze that as you want, but there's nothing there. I promise... What? ...why are you looking at me like that? You're not the mom of me, Diaz. Boss! I said boss!)

So let's push into some of the implications of the claim that art finalizes in the reception. And for the sake of contention, I'll push the extreme; this means you can't create great writing. Certainly not purposefully or intentionally, and not as such that "great writing" can be a colloquialism for "art." You also can't create art, for the same reason.

Now, I don't simply want to dazzle you with my rhetorical eloquence (i.e. bullshit) and risk losing contention under the logical might of my justifications (i.e. bullshit) so I'll leave that for your investigations. If you don't agree with this implication, let's find out why, together.

If you do agree, then I've got another one for you: All art is just as dependent (if not more so) on its audience as its creator. Also, all art is inherently pretentious.

If I threw JYH under the bus it was not intentional.

I apologize. I didn't mean to chide you on your response to him. But if the question is "do we have a goal/gameplan" and the answer is "no, still working on it" then that's the answer. I know it's difficult to guage how invested different people will be in this semi-public setting to our conversation, but we should at least be able to be honest with them as to our project. If we don't know, then we should just say that. If we do know, then surely we can articulate that without directing people to follow each of our missteps along the way. And even if it were a confusion caused by them simply refusing to read any of our conversation so far, it doesn't mean that the lines of reasoning that have worked on convincing each other will work the same on new interested parties.

I did say that literary criticism is one of my weakest areas

Well, again I suggest Paul Fry's lecture series, if you want to shore up some of that weakness. But I personally don't have a problem engaging with your ideas without that pedigree.

If my randomness makes it feel like I am wasting people's time, it is purely out of ignorance and not out of any animosity or that I simply do not care.

I understand that. Believe me when I say that, because it is that mutual understanding that allows this conversation to move forward at all. If either of us starts to think that the other one is acting out of animosity or lack of care, this conversation grinds to a halt.

I am more than willing to take a backseat as the both of you resume your old dialogue.

That won't be necessary. If JYH wants to engage, he's welcome and capable. But we we're having this discussion based on your ideas, so if you'd like to continue, let's do so.

If my ideas are not contentious enough... we could also talk about "great writing is brief" as it doesn't seem anyone is coming to defend that claim on their own?