Life and art are entangled
I am listening to Alva Noe talk about his book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are on UC Berkeley's YouTube channel.
He started his talk setting by the background by describing the catastrophic and gloomy events happening all around us. And then he says:
A young child moves her body with a sensitivity to what is expected of her. Perhaps she has seen Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift in their videos. She has danced with her mom. She has a bank of personalities and images that supply her with a sense of what feels right.
Remarkably, what feels right has everything to do with what would look right to others. With her sensitivity, however unarticulated to how others would respond to her. What she actualizes—is the child I'm imagining dancing—is nothing less than the embodiment of choreographic ideas, of which she is not the author.
This is a remarkable and distinctively human form of intelligence. The child's dancing is the location of an entanglement between her spontaneous impulse to move and an artistic representation of what movement is supposed to be.
Yağmur was dancing to the stylophine in a style I didn't know she knew. I guessed it's coming from Just Dance. I'll write more but let's continue with Noe
We come to embody choreographic ideas when we dance. We do so spontaneously, and we can hardly avoid doing so. And this, in turn, gives more and new information to choreographers who, through their art, investigate what it is we are doing when we are dancing.
This circular generative recursion, gives us resources to be different going forward. In fact, it's likely to compel us to be different going forward to reorganize ourselves. The representation changes what is represented. The act of dancing and the art of dancing become entangled. Life and art are entangled.
I am intrigued by this, should contemplate this.
Noe also adds that
Art refuses culture even as it feeds it. It does so by disrupting its habitual operations. In this sense, it emancipates us from culture.
Art enables the reorganization of the life of which it is the representation, and against which it is the reaction.
This entanglement of life with non life, technology with the reflective and disruptive work of art, becomes I think, essential to life itself, or at least are distinctively human form of life. And it's this entanglement which is the key to understanding our true nature. Or rather, as I've already indicated, it's the key to understanding why nature, the idea of a fixed way—things just are once and for all—loses its application to creatures like us bringing into focus ... the limits deposit of science and the inescapable need for other forms of reflective exploration of ourselves, such as art and philosophy.
