Raymond Tallis - Summers of Discontent: The Purpose of the Arts Today

Summers of Discontent

WILMINGTON SQUARE BOOKS

An imprint of Bitter Lemon Press

First published in 2014 by

Wilmington Square Books

47 Wilmington Square

London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

Copyright 2014 Raymond Tallis and Julian Spalding

Material from Raymond Tallis, Newtons Sleep: The Two Cultures and The Two Kingdoms (Macmillan, 1995) and Theorrhoea and After (Macmillan, 1998) is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The full published versions of these publications are available from www.palgraveconnect.com

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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-908524-416

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and typeset by Jane Havell Associates

Contents

T his book is an estuary pearl. It was formed when a river of thought about art and museums ran into an ocean of thinking about medicine and philosophy, science and literature. It is the outcome of a chance encounter in November 2010, when Ray Tallis and I met for the first time, during an hour-long taxi ride from Hereford station to Hay-on-Wye. We were both speaking at a conference, the brainchild of the filmmaker and philosopher Hilary Lawson which aimed to widen cultural debate after the Credit Crunch. Without Hilarys initiative, our paths might not have crossed. Ray and I had never heard of each others work, but I was so interested in what he had to say that I soon buried myself in his books (at that time numbering a mere twenty-three).

I found myself in a cathedral of thought a hymn to the nature of human consciousness. There were insights everywhere into all manner of everyday experiences, from crying to laughing, including an extraordinary, extended account of blushing, each describing the emergence of those impulses in the physical world of our bodies, and their expansion in meaning in the realm of our minds. One whole book is devoted to the significance of pointing; Tallis claims it is a uniquely human ability, which presupposes that even stranger attribute, our collective consciousness. Amongst all this, I found many passages on the significance of the arts, all of them startlingly fresh in their approach.

Most of the writings on the arts of which I am aware try to explain their effect on us, taking as read the fact that art is created in the first place. Tallis hasnt written about art as an end product, but instead investigates why it is made, in much the same way that he would if he were exploring the origins of a laugh, a cry or a blush. In his view, the arts emerge out of what he calls the wound in the present tense of consciousness, most clearly expressed in our inability fully to experience our experiences. He gives many reasons for this but the most fundamental is the failure of any given experience to correspond to the idea we have of it either in prospect or in retrospect. This awakens a hunger unique to humans for a more rounded or complete sense of the world. It wasnt Talliss intention to examine the arts in particular, but he found himself writing about them as part of his extraordinarily wide-ranging intellectual ambition to define what we really do and dont know about our state of being aware; more specifically, the distinctive nature of human consciousness. Thats why his ideas on the subject are essentially buried within his works, particularly Newtons Sleep (1995), The Explicit Animal (1999) and Hunger (2008), with other fascinating insights scattered throughout his vast output.

My first thought was to encourage him to write a new book specifically about the arts, but then I realised that hed already done it: the volume just needed to be excavated and compiled from his numerous texts. To his surprised delight, as well as mine, I set about this task. Its a tribute to the coherency of his thinking that his disparate insights make such sense when strung together. My role in this book has obviously been that of an enabler not a creator, but I had the pleasant illusion, while involved in this task, of being almost an artist myself, as evoked in Goethes beautiful image of the artist bending down to the flowing stream of life and lifting out a perfect sphere. The illusion is only there because the river of thought Ive dipped into has been so clear.

There is an urgent reason for publishing this book now. Talliss ideas address a pressing issue: what purpose do the arts have in todays society? In the past, artistic creation was generally in praise of gods or kings. In some cultures it still is, notably in Islamic societies, in Hindu India, and in North Korea. But in modern secular societies, the arts have no clear role. If, as John Ruskin said, all art is praise, then what do the modern arts praise? And if they dont praise, if they arent positive and beneficial to us in some way, then what is the point of them? Is it their role to warn and if so, why does no one listen to their warnings? But despite this lack of clarity of purpose, people have gone on making the arts, attending artistic events and teaching artistic subjects, and governments have gone on subsidising them (even when the artists are critical of them) because it is widely believed that in some undefined way the arts do us good, so much so that a society barren of them is held to be uncivilised.

Every city worthy of the name has to have its opera house, concert hall, theatre, library and gallery. The arts have acquired a quasi-religious status, hedged round by assumptions that one would be thought a philistine to question. Of course, the vast majority only pay lip service to them, as they once did to their state religion. Its enough that the opera house exists; people dont actually have to attend performances. Most prefer easy entertainment, so much so that its quite possible that the opera house will go the same way as the church, as societies become increasingly dumbed down. If this happens, many believe that something essential will have been lost but what? Do the arts have a vital role to play in peoples lives today, or are they merely the province of the educated middle classes, clinging to a worthy, mythic, antique raft that is about to sink under a tidal wave of vulgar, spoon-fed tat?

Talliss ideas check this slide. The implications of his theories are, I think, immense. They could and should affect how governments subsidise the arts, how theyre taught in schools and colleges, how we validate and analyse them, how we make decisions about what to preserve from the past and, even more fundamentally, how works of art are created. Tallis convincingly dispels the notion that the arts can do us any moral, social or educational good (so governments should have nothing to do with their content or creation), but then goes on to argue that, by virtue of being useless, they serve a vital purpose in helping us to cope with our awareness of the limitations of our existence, of living a finite life of incomplete meanings (so governments have a responsibility to give everyone access to them).

He makes the case that the arts are not the exclusive property of any elite, nor accessible only to the especially insightful. Even the most abstract art of all, music, which is not burdened with a fidelity to an external world, Tallis claims, pitches its bivouac in the chaotic littleness of everyday life. So he undercuts all those purely formal aspirations that have, lately, led the arts down effete, self-indulgent cul-de-sacs, and he bangs the final nail into the coffin of art made for propaganda. Tallis has identified a purpose for the arts that is based on real rather than wishful needs, and which provides a firm foundation for their development and expansion.