Of Learned Ignorance

In his essay Being Dumb the poet Kenneth Goldsmith makes a very good case for what he calls 'Smart Dumb' - but this is an argument that 'Smart Dumb' is quite a problem.

In the twentieth century lots of very clever people got embarrassed about their cleverness, and started to act the fool instead. Across many different fields and disciplines writers and artists looked for ways of suppressing their critical faculties to let their noses lead them instead. The ideals of reason and rationality that had been so important to their nineteenth century predecessors were pushed aside. A kind of studied foolishness was the new goal, and still is today.

Mannered spontaneity has become the ideal across so many fields of endeavour. Artists turned their backs on composition, classical allusions and even any kind of figurative painting to let the paint dribble off the end of their brushes. Rembrandt said that the way to paint the background was to throw a sponge full of colour at the canvas – but why not do the whole painting that way? 

A sceptical public could have a good laugh at all of this, and popular newspapers tricked critics into writing extravagant praise for abstract artworks painted by chimpanzees, or by a horse with its tail. But parody had to run to catch up as artists cycled over their canvasses or rolled around naked to smear the paint on.
It was not that the artists took their foolishness lightly – they worked very hard at making no obvious sense, as Jackson Pollock’s determination to put as much into his works, but to avoid any kind of easily recognisable pictorial representation shows. Rothko’s dense blocks of dark colour bypass the intellect to speak to … what? A spiritual sense, maybe? In Damien Hirst’s Spin Paintings the distribution of colour to background has been taken out of his hands, and made wholly mechanical as the circular boards are rotated while paint is dropped on them.

Over on the other side of town jazz musicians strained and squirmed against the heavily arranged and scored big band sound, and yearned to open up that small spot, the solo, where they could improvise. Breaking out into smaller groups they dispensed with the sheet music altogether, riffing on a theme, with the real composition happening right there, as you were watching, not a priori in the writing of the score, so that no two performances were the same. Improvisation broke out of the solo spot to consume the whole. It was not, though, a case of Anything Goes, bebop Jazz was demanding, inventive and skilful. In his later performances, Thelonius Monk would sometimes wander off the keyboard altogether, tapping and slapping the side of the piano; and yet his extraordinary real time compositions have, after the event, been written down, and you can hear the classically-trained musician Josephine Gandolfi perform them, note for note. 

Classical composers also sought to introduce chance into their works. With serial music John Cage, Harrison Birtwistle and Karlheinz Stockhausen developed notational systems that undermined conventional ideas of tunefulness and composition, sometimes working out mathematical formulae for the order of notes. Cornelius Cardew, too, played with notation, using a form of graphic notation that was open to interpretation, abandoning scores, or including open-ended instructions to musicians to keep on playing until everyone has left the hall. Cardew’s Wittgenstein-inspired notations display great intellectual rigour, but in pursuit of a largely free expression.

Writers, too, wanted to cut out the forward planning of outlines and let their inner voice speak, uninterrupted by too much thinking. Jack Kerouac famously wrote On the Road in a single sitting, on 12 foot rolls of paper, just writing and writing. People called it a ‘stream of consciousness’, first described as such in William James’ Principles of Psychology. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1924) let go of narrative to listen to the thoughts and memories that wander unbidden into the narrator’s mind, as a great panorama of family and social events passes before him.  James Joyce, in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lets Stephen Dedalus’s train of thought dominate the narrative, so that the chronology of events is broken up by the mind’s darting back and forward. Automatic writing (psychography), which had been a technique used by psychoanalysts to unleash the unconscious, was adopted by poets. In 1924 Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express . . . the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”

The studied foolishness of the artists was matched in philosophy, beginning with Edmund Husserl’s working up of what he called the ‘phenomenological’ method. Husserl was reacting against what he saw as an intractable problem in the theory of knowledge handed down from the empiricist John Locke and the rationalist Rene Descartes (so often the villain in these accounts). Frustrated with the row over whether mind or matter was the thing, Husserl raised the slogan ‘to the things themselves’. He meant we should study experience, as it presented itself to consciousness, and set aside, or bracket the question of whether there was something outside of consciousness that was its cause. Before the philosophers got to work separating out subjective and objective reality, said Husserl, there was a ‘life-world’ of lived experience, and we should linger there longer.  His investigations, and those of his clever student Martin Heidegger read a lot like the ‘stream of consciousness’ literature.

The sociologist Max Scheler took up the phenomenological method. The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs recounted a visit from Scheler, who said that ‘phenomenology was a universal method that could have anything as its intentional object’:  ‘For example phenomenological researches could be made about the devil, only the question of the devil’s reality would first have to be “bracketed”.’ It was all too much for the materialist Lukacs who scoffed ‘and when you are finished with your phenomenological picture of the devil you open the brackets and the devil in person is standing before you’. (Marxism and Human Liberation, New York, 1973, p 246-7) Today this volume would be called The Social Construction of the Devil.

Heidegger drew out the demand for a radical reform of philosophy that could only be achieved by the destruction of the received tradition from Descartes, and a return to the pre-Socratic thinkers for whom reason had not separated itself off from thinking. His students at Freiburg University took this programme of the destruction of rationalist philosophy a little too literally, and threw Descartes’ books on great bonfires, along with Spinoza’s and Marx’s. The temptation to cut the Gordian Knot of over-complicated theorising was felt in political science, too, and the German jurist Carl Schmitt developed the idea that there was always a decision which could not be second-guessed by rational explications. ‘Decisionism’ came close to a paean to the arbitrary exercise of power. Husserl’s phenomenology inspired the French writer Jean Paul Sartre, too, and his existential philosophy, with its claim that man makes himself, and its demand to live in the moment. Sartre was struck by Charlie Parker’s free form Jazz, saying that he (Sartre) had only written about existentialism, but Parker was existentialism.

The fear that reason was taking us away from the truth of things was felt by anthropologists, self-conscious that their theoretical schemas had too often become dogma, forcing the peoples they studied into preconceived notions of different stages of civilisation. To combat this over theorised anthropology, Clifford Geertz used ‘thick description’ (unhappy phrase) of the lives of other peoples, making sure that theorising was pushed aside in favour of ever greater detail in accounts. Geographers, too, were unhappy with the monocular view of the map-reader, and wanted to do away with the rational framework of Cartesian coordinates. Instead they would wander unbidden through the city, as psycho-geographers, recording their feelings about the places they stumbled into as if they were facts as relevant as the objective conditions. 

These philosophers and sociologists thought they saw a warrant for their work in scientific developments. Riemann’s geometry showed that the rules of ordinary geometry (such as the total of the angles of a triangle equalling 180 degrees) would no longer apply if the surface on which the triangle was drawn were curved. Riemannian geometry seemed to suggest that what had been thought of as the laws of an objective world were instead a formal construction of thought. Later the physicist Niels Bohr would demonstrate that in the measurement of electrons, the measurement itself would influence the outcome. These innovations would be interpreted as supporting the view that that the world outside was constructed by our reasoning of it.

Little wonder, then, that when the French post-modernists voiced incredulity towards all grand narratives their anti-philosophical philosophy found a ready audience.  Already in 1968 the youth-student flavour to the revolt had raised up the slogan, ‘all power to the imagination’, and in 1989 the last paradigm of reason enthroned collapsed in misery in the east, while its paler echo in west European Social Democracy was in retreat.  Even Pope John Paul felt confident to announce ‘the collapse of rationalist optimism, which viewed history as the triumphant progress of reason, the source of all happiness and freedom.’  Later on an aide of George Bush’s – alleged to be Karl Rove - would tell Ron Suskind that he was stuck ‘in what we call the reality-based community’,  which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’

 ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too’. 

Reason took quite a battering in the twentieth century, when it was obliged to give way to intuition and faith. Most pointedly even the really clever people were embarrassed at the claims of rationalism, giving rise to a studied ignorance. That studied ignorance came with all the trappings of theory, but was more of an anti-theoretical turn, clever words turned against critical reflection.

Is it possible, or desirable to return to a rationalist world-view in the twenty-first century? To demand a return to a safe world where there is objective reality, and critical reflection of it in thought seems unbearably naïve. It hardly seems likely that the many imaginative routes that artists, writers and philosophers have taken by suppressing their critical faculties could be cast aside. Still there remains a problem that theoretical reflection is wounded by self-doubt and distrust that militates against thinking, threatening to raise stupidity into a virtue.

James Hearfield (written 31 May 2012)