1 First International Conference on ANTICIPATION 5-7 November 2015, TRENTO (Italy) Mariselda Tessarolo, Eleonora Bordon University of Padova “Anticipation

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First International Conference onANTICIPATION

5-7 November 2015, TRENTO (Italy)

Mariselda Tessarolo, Eleonora Bordon

University of Padova

“Anticipation and creativity in art”

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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).

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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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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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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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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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).


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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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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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.


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

Adorno T.W. (1969). Il fido maestro sostituto. Torino: Einaudi.Agamben, G. (2008). Che cos’è il contemporaneo?. Roma: Nottetempo Edizioni.Bauman Z. (1992). La decadenza degli intellettuali, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.Bauman Z. (2002). Il disagio della postmodernità. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.Bourdieu P. (2009). Ragioni pratiche. Bologna: Il Mulino.Dal Lago A., Giordano S. (2006). Mercanti d’aura. Bologna: Il Mulino.Dal Lago A., Giordano S., (2014). L’artista e il potere. Bologna: Il Mulino.Della Corte A., Pannain G. (1952). Storia della musica, Vol. II. Torino: Tipografia Sociale Torinese.Duvignaud P. (1969). Per una sociologia dell’arte. Bologna: Il Mulino.Eco U. (1979). Lector in Fabula. Milano: Bompiani.Gombrich E.H. (1985). L’immagine e l’occhio. Torino: Einaudi.Guyer, J. I. (2007). Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time. American Ethnologist, 34(3), 409-421.

References

Husserl E. (1998). Per la fenomenologia della coscienza interna del tempo. Milano: FrancoAngeli (orig. 1928).Husserl E., (2002). Idee per una fenomenologia pura e per una filosofia fenomenologia.Torino: Einaudi.Iser W. (1987). L’atto di lettura. Bologna: Il MulinoKoselleck R. (2009). Il vocabolario della modernità. Bologna: Il Mulino.Poli, R. (2010). The Many Aspects of Anticipation. Foresight, 12(3), 7-17. Romano C. (2010). Il possibile e l’evento. Introduzione all’ermeneutica evenemenziale, a cura di C. Catullo. Milano: Mimesis.Tessarolo M. (2007). Lo spazio sociale. In L.Verdi, M. Tessarolo, Questioni di spazio. Padova: Cleup.Tynianov J.V. (1968). Avanguardie e tradizione. Bari: Dedalo.Weich K.E. (1979). La psicologia sociale dei processi organizzativi. Torino: ISEDI.

Documents

1 First International Conference on ANTICIPATION 5-7 November 2015, TRENTO (Italy) Mariselda Tessarolo, Eleonora Bordon University of Padova “Anticipation