Self-Expression? WTF?

Introduction

Like most people I thought I knew what was meant by the term self-expression. But the more I thought about it the more I had my doubts.

After a while I realized that the problem wasn’t so much with the word expression as it was with the word self. And the problem was that every time I heard others use the term self-expression, and every time I used it, the emphasis was put on expression, as in I want to express myself, and certainly never, I want to express my self, exactly because the assumption was that the self was a given, that it was assumed to be an actual entity.

In other words, the use was metaphysical, and, as such, an example of the logical fallacy of misplaced concreteness. That doesn’t mean that we’re not talking about something when we use the word self, as in self-expression, or the term the self, as in the self behind the role. It just means that the way we are talking about it is misleading and, therefore, inadequate and wrong.

Being a student of 19th century cultural history I found in my reading over the years, different writers, from Cardinal Newman to John Ruskin, the idea typical of that century that still dominates most thinking on the problem today*, that any writing with self-expression as its aim was thought of as a kind of window between the writer’s inner-life and outer world.

*Even those who hate the Western canon. Can you say cultural apporpriation. Ooops!

Proof, yet again, that, in spite of the institutional power and cultural control they now have, they are still dependent on the those they resent. Put bluntly, in spite of their power they are still looking up.

A good example can be found in one of my favorite poems, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, where the picture of the lady weaving her designs from what she has seen in the mirror, which reflects reality, is an allegorical visual image of the 19th century’s idea of the relationship of, not just the alienated artist to a complacent and uncomprehending society, but the writer to reality itself. The poet* in this case is conceived of as living within the inner world of the “self”, and when the poet leaves that inner world and moves into the outer world, they are, as a creative artist - destroyed.

*Of course, the words poet and poem can be used in the most general, least demanding sense, to refer to any artistic creator and their creation, whether it be paintings, novels, essays, or music.

This window of the soul, or the “self” has, of course, also the dimension of time, and, consequently, the poem, or any piece of creative writing, such as an article or essay, is thought of as a record of experience, just as many 19th century painters, like Constable, saw their own work. This being so, the relationship of the reader to the writer is that of someone who relives or recreates the experience, which was originally lived by the poet and which is recorded in the poem, essay, or painting, or piece of music, which explains why so many great composers of the 19th century used literary analogue for the purpose of self-expression. Berlioz and Shumann both come irresistably to mind. It’s exactly this that has led to a misunderstanding of the phrase self-expression. And though it was understandable that the first explorers into the self should make that mistake, it’s no longer necessary for us to continue to do so. Especially since, if one continues to do so when they now know better, self-expression becomes self-betrayal. Which is something Tennyson knew a lot about, and not just Tennyson. That’s why he was careful to use his art to rescue himself from the dangers of self-betrayal. In my case, it’s the very justification for writing this essay in the first place.

So, toward that end, what I would like to do in the rest of this entry is to take three propositions and apply them to this problem of self-expression. Primarily, my focus will not be upon “expression”, but upon the “self.”

I

These propositions can be presented in the following way:

1. Metaphysical language is without “meaning”; that is, metaphysical linguistic structure is not the same kind of structure as scientific linguistic structure. It is not cognitive language.

2. The “Self” is not an entity and the word does not refer to an entity the existence of which can be empirically verified. This, however, does not mean - as I shall shortly try to explain - that when we use the word “self” we are not talking about anything at all.

3. This proposition is that in reading literature of any kind, we must assume that the spokesman of the work is not to be identified with the author, and that we go from spokesman to author by an act of biographical inference. Of course, this was set forth way back when by Beardsley and Wimsatt in their famous “The Intentional Fallacy.”*

   
   

*The Intentional Fallacy is neither clear, nor well argued, or coherent, much like The Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, which was more or less contemporaneous, and, like Critical Theory, served as a sort of precursor to CRT. Still, unlike Critical Theory and CRT, The Intentional Fallacy is not entirely useless. For that reason I am using one aspect of it for my own purposes here, and that purpose is interpretation not evaluation (saying whether or not a work is good or bad, which is the easiest and least interesting thing anyone can say about a work of art), which is the whole point of The Intentional Fallacy. Hence the quasi-religious aspect of it, and of all Critical Theory.

If I’m on the right track in stating that to posit the “self” is to use metaphysical language and not, loosely, scientific or cognitive language, we can dispose of the proposition that one’s writing is an example of self-expression in the sense that something inside the “self” goes out into or is projected upon, or is reflected in, something outside the “self.”

Because if this is metaphysical language it is meaningless language. But, again, can we really say that we are not talking about anything at all when we speak of writing as self-expression? To that problem I shall now turn.

II

Psychology* has taught us that the root of our emotional life lies in the sense of identity, which apparently begins to emerge about the age of two.

That’s why the fear of heights, and even the fear of death, is not a real fear in the sense that it is a recognition of a real threat to our existence but is, rather, a fear not of death, or of heights, but of the loss of identity, and value, since the two go together, and the sense of identity does not come to us naturally. On the contrary, it is hard won and difficult to maintain. This is the explanation for why individuals who identify themselves as members of Identity Politics or MAGA are not human beings, but social roles - puppets.

*Serious psychology in the tradition of William James, not politically-biased pop psychology one finds on youtube, the kind that dollups out recipies on how to live while simultaneously shame-trolling its own comment sections for Wrongthink.

This is why the hostile elite currently running, and deliberately ruining, the West is attacking the sense of identity and value of an entire race, their designated scapegoat - whites. Evidence of the petty lengths they’ll go to is found in their current use of white in small case of black in large case. A better example of narcissistic belittlement would be hard to imagine.

Fortunately, for some, the source of the sense of identity and the sense of value comes from themselves, and not from the hostile elite, or their poc proxies and useful idiots, and certainly not from the MAGA mob.

Be that as it may, if we examine the actual behavior of people, we find that it is an inconsistent and discontinuous mixture of conscious and unconscious reactions to a storm of ever-differing, constantly changing phenomena.

A further look shows us that each person has a self-portrait which is a construct - or a selection on the basis of models learned from society - from all of the individual’s bits and pieces of behavior, one which does not correspond to the full range of behavior.

This self-portrait is, in itself, inconsistent, but it does have a certain kind of structure, that is, each person lives according to a predominating role. It is only a crazy person, such as someone who thinks they’re Napolean, or a hostile elite who lives out of a Myth of Innocence that say, in effect, We never do anything wrong - ever. Things are done to us, who maintains an absolutely consistent and fixed self-portrait and acts according to it. These are the psychos of the world, and they are not just in our insane asylums. Today they occupy positions of great power, which is exactly why they are so dangerous, and why treason against them is loyalty to humanity.

The healthy person, on the other hand, is constantly changing their self-portrait and actually has at their control a wide range of roles and differing self-portraits, which they can adopt as they situation demands. This is the kind of thing Yeat’s had in mind when he developed his doctrine of masks.

Now if, from the behavior of the individual, we isolate their linguistic behavior, we will observe that it has all the characteristics of the self-portrait; that is, it lacks logical structure and is adapted to a wide range of varying roles. In this sense, we can say that every sentence an individual utters in normal life, that is, in their social relationships, reflects a slightly different role, and sometimes, a profoundly different role. It's immediately obvious that there are cerrtain kinds of verbal behavior which have, for instance, the characteristic of logical structure. Of course, for a long time now there has been a profound disagreement on what logic is and its relationship to reality (or what lies outside of the structure which includes signs which point or refer to something outside the structure) and even on the origin of logic. But this disagreement need not affect the argument. All that is necessary is to accept the proposition that a series of sentences organized according to logical structure is a unique and special kind of verbal behavior, or linguistic organization, of which we can't say much except that it has that strange quality known as structure and that it is a verbal activity profoundly different from ordinary linguistic behavior. I understand that all of this might sound too technical and, so, remote from day to day life. But, as we shall see, nothing could be further from the truth.

III

When it comes to creative writing, the best example to help us understand all of this is poetry. Why? Well, poetry has structure - in rhythm, in stanzaic organization, and, for some poetry, in symbolic organization, as well as in the organization of images. The interesting, and very telling thing, about these various kinds of poetic structure is that they have never really been carefully distinguished or even recognized, and the reason for this critical lack strikes to the heart of what we're talking about here, that is, the very assumption that the whole poem is thought of as a sign with reference to the "self." But if, as we have seen, the "self" is not an entity, we can scarcely have a sign which points to it. Furthermore, and here we get closer to the relevance of all of this to each and every one of us, this structure of poetry is like logical structure, a most untypical or anormal kind of linguistic structure. The people who prate constantly about logic and reason have, in my experience, and happily not just mine, consistently failed to recognize the obvious fact that not just logic and reason, but also social institutions and indeed civlization itself, do not come naturally to human beings.

Certain words used by both reader and writer give us a hint of what is going on in the poetic activity of either. The poet speaks of inspiration from a source outside of their "self." They often speak the way the reader speaks, that is, they will say they lose themselves in the activity of artistic creation.

For many people with a somewhat naive tendencey this is their single aesthetic test - they lose themselves in reading the poem or in looking at the play, or painting, or watching the movie, or in reading the novel, or listenting to music. This is the equivalent of what the poet calls inspiration.

WTF are they talking about? What are any of us talking about when we are either playing the creative role or the perceiver role? Answering this question will make it immediately apparent, at least to some, just how central all of this is to each and every one of us in our daily lives.

And the answer is, like the man who thinks he's Napoleon, or, in keeping with the times, Cleopatra, he experiences, for the time being, a consistent role. This consistency is the #1 defense human beings have against the primary attribute of the human brain - randomness of response.* That is, their verbal behavior is organized according to the structure of a role and does not, as it does in ordinary life, skip rapidly from one role to another.

*This genetic attribute of randomness is both a savior and nemisis to any individual and group, depending on the individual or collective response to it. This shamefully - and curiously - neglected attribute of the human brain is central to every aspect of what we call culture and so is equally central to what is meant by self-expression. That being the case, the more we know about the brain's capacity for randomness the better, especially in regard to its place in human innovation and adaptation.

The teacher, for instance, experiences something like acting: During the time of their teaching performance they act according to a certain pre-existent model or pattern of "the teacher." That's why the more conscious the teacher is of the difference between this role and their ordinary self-portrait, the better the teacher they are. Just as we can make a distinction between the acting of a celebrity-focused actor like Alec Baldwin, who seems to confuse art and life, and that of a disciplined artist like Ian McKlellan.

When we say that a poem, or any creative act, is self-expression we mean that through its structure it is the creation of a temporarily consistent "self." As stated earlier, the implications of this are really very great. How so?

Because it means that a creative artist can achieve an understanding and an acceptance or rejection of a particular emotional attitude which they can not practice in real life. To use another one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets, in Swinburne's Anactoria we have a complete description by Sappho of masochistic love, which arouses her to a fury of aggressive verbalization. And an analysis of the poem shows us, in the flight of Venus from the Isle of Lesbos, that Swinburne is saying that this kind of love is a wrong kind of love; yet in his own life he was never able to solve that problem, and he could get along only by submitting himself to the control of his friend Watts-Dunton. To all of this one might ask, So what?

Well, when it comes to the kind of biographical criticism that is more interested in moralized snap judgments, for or against, the poem would be taken either as proof that Swinburne had solved this problem, or, working from Swinburne to the poem, it would be taken as an expression of Swinburne's emotional life, and it would be said that the poem does not imply that this kind of love is a failure. I don't think I need to point out to the reader how common this sort of thinking is in every day life. In our anxiety to judge others, we rarely think very carefully. In fact, speaking of Swinburne, not a few critics over the years have rejected him wholesale on the grounds that his work is the expression of a neurotic "self." From the perspective offered here, however, it's pretty clear that Swinburne was capable of understanding, describing, and rejecting an emotion which dominated his whole life. And this, of course, is why he is one of my favorite poets. In any event, to move from a work of art directly to the emotional life of the artist is a biographical inference that can't be justified.

IV

Psychologically, the function of the role of creator or perceiver is to give us relief from our continuous struggle to maintain the sense of identity, which it will be remembered, does not come to us naturally and, owing to the primary attribute of the human brain, is won and maintained at great cost. It is the kind of relief that children have on Halloween. By dressing up they create an image of themselves which is the basis for a self-portrait according to which they can act with emotional consistency for a few hours.

This is why art can be so profoundly moving. And I mean real art, not something called art that is politically preachy and intellectually frivolous and put together and enjoyed by an "artist" and audience who are incurably shallow, pretentious, and self-righteous. And by real art is meant something with a superior intellectual structure and profound emotional depth. Which is something politicized art always pretends to, but can never acheive.

Either way, it has to be said, and always to the credit of great art and to the discredit of pseudo-art, that any creative act - and our response to it - is the organization of the emotional attitudes of one's emotional life. To relate images which have emotional significance or color or suffusion is to organize and relate the emotions themselves. The varying effects of one emotional attitude upon another are, for the time being, made consistent and structured and, consequently, have meaning.

To use a word I don't particularly care for, and so try to avoid, especially in my writing, the true psychological function of art is to give us the experience of maintaining the sense of identity and value. The more profoundly, the more richly we have this experience, the more successful we will be in creating this sense of identity and value. From the point of view of both creator and perceiver, writer and reader, composer and listener, art is one of the healthiest activities a human being can engage in. That's why it's not at all surprising that its particular appeal should be stronger to those of us who, for whatever reason, are especially aware of the difficulties that lie in the way of one's struggle for the sense of identity and value. From this perspective, one is inclined to raise curious doubts about a hostile elite dead set on destroying the great art of the West by placing it under the iron paw of a shallow and dogmatic ideological cult that not only prohibits creativity and interpretation, but actually subordinates every individual's sense of idenity to a political interpretation that the cult* obstinately refers to as "the truth."

*A more fragile hold on one's sense of identity than fanaticism would be hard to imagine.

V

Finally, the task of criticism is not to find out something in the artist's life to which the particulars in their work point, because that only ends in a critical cul-de-sac and quickly devolves into gossip. Rather, the task of criticism is to discover whether or not the work of art has a consistent structure. To find out whether it has or has not a consistent structure requires the development of techniques that one is hard-pressed to find. Indeed, I have only found such techniques, at least in their most developed form, in the work of the cultural historian and behavioral theorist Morse Peckham. And Peckham arrived at such techniques as a result of his realization that the study of structure itself is the most important task of criticism and not just criticism.

The proposal here is that the development of a more reliable criticism* will involve the development of a critical language that functions as a special limited language that will refer to the structure of a work of art and not to anything that lies outside of that structure, such as a highly moralized political ideology whose truth-claims are laughable and so can't be justified.

*As opposed to the Frankfurt School-based Critical Theory (and its derivatives, such as CRT) which has dominated our teaching-learning institutions in one way or another for decades, in spite of the fact that such "criticism" amounts to little more than a combination of logical fallacy, pseudo-intellectual comedy, and gossip.

Furthermore, the acceptance of this proposition must involve a reconsideration of the portraits of the "selves" of poets, novelists, and other creative artists which biographers have created not just over the last one hundred years, but the past several hundred years. At the same time, this approach will help shed considerable light on the problem of why people in general, and journalists and biographers in particular, have insisted on extracting from the consideration of literature and nonliterary biographical data such differing and inconsistent pictures, such as, on the one hand, an artist, like Shelly, for example, as a completely aimless and irresponsible "neurotic", and on the other hand, as a man with aim and direction and a steadily growing sense of identity, and a steadily growing responsibility toward himself, his family and friends, and society as a whole. That this is true of Shelly is why he too is one of my all time favorite poets.

Concluding Remarks

A work of art is not self-expression. It is the creation of a self, of a role, a recognizable pattern of behavior, that gives both creator and perceiver, writer and reader, a continuous sense of identity and value, a sense traditionally called inspiration. For this reason, the term self-expression should be dropped from the critical vocabulary as metaphysical and meaningless, and in its place we should try to create a language which will help us explore and describe the various kinds of artistic structure. This essay has been an attempt to move toward the creation of such a langauge.

With the term self-expression dropped we can then easily jettison all of Critical Theory's metaphysical - and meaningless - vocabulary such as, racism, sexism, anti-semitism, and the rest of the unquestioned and unanalyzed pseudo-categories that serve as the very shaky foundation upon which rests, not just all of Critical Theory, but the power of the hostile elite. A vocabulary, moreover, that inspite of its meaninglessness, has functioned unchallenged, and for a long time now, too long, as "the truth."

A truth that everyone is expected to blindly obey, no matter what, or else.

Put bluntly, all of the sacred words of Critical Theory must be attacked head on and without mercy, so that we may undermine the hostile elite's power, and above all else, recover our freedom, and restore ourselves to sanity.

Once the hostile elite is, like Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, reduced to low comedy, we can then resume our study of the great art of the pre-Woke West with a language that will not only inspire creator and perceiver, but prove servicable to all concerned, and far into the future.

The readiness is all!