In Which I Fail to Say Anything Conclusive About Inspiration, Cultures and Creativity

Following on from the unresolved question of whether material about a given culture is 'part' of that culture, I'm now going to shift to asking a similar question about inspiration and influence.

Hypothesis #1: if x is 'part' of culture C, material inspired by x is also part of culture C.

Hypothesis #2: if x is 'part' of culture C, material inspired by x may weaken the position of x as part of culture C.

I don't think anyone actually holds #1 in so thoroughgoing a form – it entails, for example, the surprising conclusion that Othello, inspired by an Italian text, is part of Italian culture – but presumably we mean something like it by the term 'Americanisation': not only the import in large quantities of U.S. media, but also their subsequent influence on domestic creativity and cultural expectations, is held up by the use of the word as a form of cultural encroachment. At any rate, getting clear about what's wrong with #1 may help clarify what does make a thing part of a culture. After all, when asking what culture consists of I presumably should be taking an interest in the transmission and interaction of ideas; and in many cases in which transmission happens we describe it by saying that one cultural item inspires another, the creative act being seen to depend on a previous item or corpus as a stimulus or catalyst.

Inspiration is a causal process, of a sort: the thing that inspires doesn't do so through any kind of activity in its own right, of course, but it is necessary for the resulting event of inspiration to take place, and hence for any consequent creativity to occur; and we construe this process as a sort of intellectual impact, in which the source of inspiration (the Muse, even) as grammatical subject 'inspires' the creative as object. So if (as seems impeccably plausible on the face of it) the transmission and propagation of ideas is important to culture, and by 'inspiration' we pick out processes by which it happens, how could inspiration not contribute to determination of cultural parthood? Moreover, if we wish to incline ourselves more towards #2 and say that to draw on the styles and motifs of another culture counts as 'cultural appropriation', x's powers of inspiration spilling over into effects within other cultures (D, E...) and thereby weakening x's position as a distinctive part of its own originating culture C—then on what grounds will we be claiming that the inspired has appropriated the inspirer, rather than that the inspirational culture is expanding its territory? Do such judgments draw on any understanding of how processes of inspiration operate, or are they entirely a matter of how cultural material is put to practical use as an instrument of (political) power?

It's a complication that 'inspiration' incorporates a lot of subtle distinctions and forms: homage, parody and caricature, satirisation, fictionalisation and cameo, ode and epitaph, and so on. Inspiration may be manifested in more or less overt emulation: besides the sort of appropriation in the arts which Young delineates into 'style appropriation', 'content appropriation', and so on (p. 5ff), it's possible to hold up more general or abstract aspects of a culture as inspirational, such as when peoples alleged to live in harmony with nature are held up as examples for the West to learn from and emulate. Besides emulation and adoption, inspiration may involve seeking to surpass others' already inspiring achievements; or it may even involve being negatively inspired to avoid emulation—in the sense that a practice common in some other culture but considered distasteful in our own may reinforce our opposition by giving us a concrete example of what we avoid. Inspiration may not even be consciously recognised by those undergoing it.

At a minimum, what I envisage for cultural 'inspiration' is that (1) experience of (some aspect of) C was a necessary condition for the production of x in the form it takes, and (2) the aspects of x under consideration were not simply copied from C. (Prototypes don't inspire production lines, and bootlegs are not products of inspiration. Nevertheless, I wonder whether I have worked this stipulation out far enough: it would seem natural enough, for example, to say that someone inspired me to emulate him in order to become like him.)

Ordinarily we might be inclined to say that a thing belongs to the culture to which its makers subscribe; but insofar as we can perceive elements of the trappings of some other culture in its composition, we may wonder whether the makers of the new work can in fact unreservedly be called its creators. This boils down to a question about the nature of creativity: if we can perceive the influence of x, which is part of culture C, in some work y produced by someone who is an outsider relative to C, are we to say that x-in-y is still part of C, and therefore that at least part of y is part of it; or are we instead to conclude that the alchemy of creativity can render x, though still recognisable as inspiration in y, not actually present in y?

On general principles of economy (and a disinclination to become embroiled in concerns about 'the imperialist claims of the Romantic author' (Coombe, 'The Properties of Culture and the Possession of Identity: Postcolonial Struggle and the Legal Imagination', in Borrowed Power)) I should prefer to avoid depending on any contested understanding of the nature of creativity, but this looks like a difficult thing to achieve. Culture is full of created things, and the question of who can claim credit for creating them naturally tends to loom large in patrimony disputes, making it hard to evade the question of what exactly creativity involves.

The question of method I then face is that of whether it's possible to talk about the role processes of inspiration might have in determining which cultures count the products of those processes as their parts, without making substantive assumptions about the nature of creativity in the process. If we introduce it as a reasonable-looking premise that the product of a creative act is by default part of the culture its creator subscribes to, then a fortiori a genuinely creative use of appropriated material, as opposed to a purely imitative one, will create something that qualifies as a part of the immediate creator's culture; the complaint about 'Americanisation' is more about perceived slavish imitation and importation than about creatively inspired adaptation. What isn't so easy is to establish the conditions in which a creation can be inspired by a part of another culture without incorporating it, since formal similarities alone aren't a sufficient indicator of appropriation between cultures: complaints about appropriation depend on actual acts of emulation having occurred. If two cultures independently developed styles, stories, etc. which happened to be similar, it's difficult to imagine either getting very far with a complaint about the other's use thereof.

Although with some digging I could no doubt find out more about what other commentators have had to say about inspiration and the forms of cross-cultural creativity, I persist in thinking it would be unsafe to rely on assumptions about anyone's being right about the matter. It's tempting, given that I've previously been happy to emphasise the mutually reinforcing potential of links between works without worrying much about cultural boundaries, to go back to talking about 'clusters of ideas' without worrying about cultural parthood; but when appropriation debates tend to depend on questions of what belongs to which culture, they rather have to be defused rather than ignored. The best I could do at this stage, perhaps, is investigate whether facts of cultural parthood lend themselves to being morally relevant within the framework I've been developing for thinking about cultural 'value'; but I suspect that a negative answer, on its own, would most likely invite criticism of the framework.

Solved At Last

Many have speculated that s/he is Darill, Setzer Gabbiani's ex-girlfriend. Another theory is that Gogo is actually the return of Emperor Gestahl... Another possible speculation is that Gogo is the leader of the band of thieves that Edgar is seen impersonating... Yet another common theory is that Gogo is Shadow/Clyde's former partner, Baram... Another theory is that Gogo is actually Vargas... One very, very possible theory is that Gogo is Banon... Another theory is that Gogo is Gilgamesh...
Final Fantasy Wikia

But if Drood is dead, who is Datchery? ... Is Helena putting her cross-dressing to good use, to clear her brother's name? ... [Bazzard's] acquaintance with the theatre might suggest him as the perfect person to don a costume... Then again, there's Lieutenant Tartar. Both he and Datchery have sunburned complexions and a military air... Is Grewgious Datchery? Is everyone Datchery? This is becoming chaotic!

The Book of Lost Books, p. 303, on The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The conundrum is solved, for a given value of 'solved': clearly Gogo = Datchery.

Harrowing Imagery?

If there's anything 'very disturbing and shocking, and totally inappropriate' in a recent story about controversy over a picture of a woman in a black hijab pointing a gun, it's that a commentator from Harrow Central Mosque could say it 'shows a Muslim woman as a terrorist' in the apparently confident expectation that in a modern British art gallery, to portray an armed Muslim woman simply is to depict a terrorist.

She looks to me like an enforcer of law and order.

Culturule

Another instalment in the quest to know what counts as part of a culture: can rules or standards be parts of culture? Entering the search term 'cultural norm' into Google Scholar reveals it to be in widespread use, although I have experienced difficulties in locating a definition. In recent years there has been some political commentary on 'British values', which were even considered as a topic for the school syllabus. More recently still, the Abbot of Worth has stated in opposition to Disney that '[w]here once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products'.

Can such things – norms, values, (a) morality itself – be considered parts of (a) culture? If so, what distinguishes, say, cultural norms from other norms?

It's easy enough to think of rules and standards which we might associate with particular cultural backgrounds: bodies of laws; parliamentary rules; manners and etiquette (and British queuing practices); linguistic conventions and variations on them; and so on. All these are parochially constructed rules, rather than universal 'laws of logic'; moreover, they developed gradually through co-operative processes, rather than being products of individual genius. Are those plausible necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: are all such rules 'cultural'?

A more fundamental question, if we suppose these examples to be apt ones: is it then the rules themselves, or expressions thereof, which are perhaps parts of culture (if this is indeed a valid distinction; and laying aside Wittgensteinian musing over what exactly it means to follow a rule)? It's initially tempting to say that surely our culture includes rules themselves: that it is not only true as a matter of empirical fact that on British roads people drive on the left, but moreover it is the case that on British roads one follows the rule of driving on the left. Yet things begin to look awkward once one recalls that statutes require interpretation, languages require analysis for their grammatical structure to be discovered, etc. (Is it a rule of Western storytelling that at the end of modern fairy tales 'they all lived happily ever after'? A convention? A cliché?) We face not only an epistemological problem – how do we establish just what the rules are in any given domain of regulation (by applying higher-level rules?), and can we confidently identify them as parts of a culture if they persistently resist our certain knowledge? – but also a difficulty in identifying where there are determinate rules in play at all.

By way of illustration, suppose we tried to use the idea of rules included within a culture to characterise what Young calls 'style appropriation', in which 'artists produce works with stylistic elements in common with the works of another culture' (Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, p. 6). In order to identify 'style appropriation' we should need to establish what 'style' is, and perhaps (especially when talking about a 'style' that can be taught and used by multiple artists, rather than the idiosyncrasies of an individual's personal style) we should wish to refer to the constraints which one imposes upon oneself in order to work within a style. Young gives as examples of 'style appropriation' '[m]usicians who are not a part of African-American culture but who compose jazz or blues works', and 'culturally mainstream Australians who paint in the style of the Aboriginal peoples' (ibid): the specific works created will not be copies, but their production will involve the adoption of those constraints which define 'jazz' or 'Aboriginal painting'. Or at least (recalling Young's concerns about 'distortion' elsewhere in the book), they will adopt sufficiently similar constraints to produce something clearly resembling the style they are attempting to imitate.

Suppose we take a bona fide Aboriginal painting and place alongside it a non-Aborigine's attempt to work in what we take to be the same style: no doubt when we come to compare them we shall find many points of similarity, but none of these similarities will itself be a rule. Indeed, we can compare any number of paintings and expect never to be able to point to some aspect shared between them and say that we are pointing at a constraint of style (as opposed to a characteristic which the paintings happen all to share but which is not definitive of the style in which they were painted). Rather, the rule is inferred from the evidence; and in order to be confident about our understanding of the rules that govern not only all actual but all possible works in a style, to know which departures from prior practice the style permits and which would amount to a change in style, we should no doubt be unable to do better than to rely on the judgment of those whose working style it is. (Some researchers investigating the possibility of a machine-readable 'grammar' to describe an artist's work [PDF] offer the caveat: 'Perhaps after many successful attempts at writing grammars and other algorithms for explaining style have been made, the process will become sufficiently routine as to suggest mechanization. But at this time, it appears to us that serious fine art is too rich and varied to allow a mechanical discovery of its structure. The computer participates in this process only by offering scholars a powerful, expressive tool, which processes their insights and allows them to explore the consequences of those insights. It is an intellectual debugging tool that encourages ambitious intellectual undertakings.')

If we are unable to discover the rules which we suppose to constitute the style of the works under examination as constitutive elements in them, then it seems reasonable to doubt that we could discover such rules as constitutive elements of a culture either. Perhaps to go beyond saying that in a given culture things tend to be done in a certain way, and to say that part of the culture in question is a rule to that effect, is a kind of artificial reification. Indeed, in some cases it seems difficult to be sure whether the aspect of culture we are looking at is best characterised as a rule or as a region of freedom from formalised rules: a recent news report on Britain's opt-out from the European Union's stipulated maximum of a 48-hour working week quotes a reference to 'the UK's long hours culture', which, if there is such a thing as a culture of working long hours in Britain, exists in part not by virtue of a rule compelling long hours but as a result of opting out of applying a rule preventing them. Should we call the opt-out itself a rule, or the expression of a rule; or is it a sufficient condition to make working long hours an aspect of British culture that many of us do it, in contrast to other nations in which (for whatever reason) such a thing is not done?

Given these considerations, how are we to understand 'style appropriation'? We shall note, of course, that (returning to the example above) the work of some non-Aboriginal artists has tendencies in common with that of some Aboriginal artists; but if we cannot pick out some entity, the 'style' in question, which is copied from one culture into another, then we should anticipate difficulties not only in establishing whether some sort of appropriation has occurred but, moreover, in establishing whether a style which is a part of a particular culture has been appropriated by a cultural outsider. Even when we have confidence in our judgment that one person's output looks decidedly derivative of another person's, it remains an open question whether a part of one culture has been grafted onto another.

What about such rules governing general behaviour – morals, manners and so on – as we might expect to be widely internalised, expounded and upheld against deviants, and therefore to be more readily accessible to participants within a culture at large than an artistic style? It's at least conventional (though not altogether uncontentious, of course) that moral rules lend themselves to vocalisation: 'Thou shalt not kill', to take a famous and culturally loaded example. As for etiquette, entire books are available for those needing to know the proper way to open a letter to the widow of the second son of a duke. Such rules, therefore, have an apparently public character; and it is a commonplace that manners and moral opinions vary between cultures and are often characteristic of one culture or another.

Indeed, one sometimes hears politicians, businessmen and others speak of creating a culture (presumably meaning an aspect of the organisational, local or national culture, rather than a subculture contained within it) as an objective: I don't know quite what this means, but it seems to involve the endorsement of certain standards of behaviour. Some recent examples culled from Google News results are as follows:

• RCN general secretary Peter Carter said: 'It is up to child protection services to create a culture where it is acceptable for staff to express their concerns and reservations if they suspect a child is at risk...'
  Nursing Times

• Though the amount of the awards are not so impressive (top prize is $500), the ministry still hopes to inspire young Christians to take up the pen and promote the Christian worldview through fiction and create a culture of quality writing reflecting that worldview.
  Christian Post

• You need to establish what you are doing as a company to create a culture of learning and development.
  Business Intelligence Middle East

• Create a unique culture: One of the fundamental reasons for the growing popularity of brand communities is that they offer companies real time feedback about the brand.
  Branding Strategy Insider

• The handbook, Promoting Transformative Innovation in Schools aims to support education practitioners to create a 'culture of innovation' in schools by detailing resources designed to help teachers to be innovative, both in and out of the classroom.
  Education Executive

It would probably be reasonable to infer that this is a different sense of the word 'culture' from that with which 'cultural heritage' is concerned, but either way, the implication seems to be that the 'cultures' in question are characterised by certain manipulable values or standards. I suspect that in general, what's actually being suggested is that an existing culture should receive enhancements, rather than that a new 'culture' should be created from scratch: a school culture would exist before a 'culture of innovation' was added, for example. Consequently one can't tell from the surface grammar whether the idea is that a culture defined by some standard is to be created, implying that the standard is integral to the identity of the culture and therefore, if 'part' of it, an irremovable part; or whether it's that an existing culture is to be saturated with a standard which previously was absent or more weakly present, implying that such standards are detachable aspects of cultures which can be added without changing a culture's identity.

When it comes to 'culture' as in 'cultural heritage', I think it's plain enough that we accept the continuity of their identities through quite considerable change; the fact that we wonder, for example, about the significance for Greek claims to the Elgin Marbles of the great religious differences between ancient and modern Greek culture is a consequence of the belief that a continuous 'Greek culture' (once ancient, now modern) exists to be spoken of. Yet again, however, this doesn't seem to provide secure grounds for thinking that a rule or standard itself can be part of a culture: what we see changing are practices, not necessarily also the rules governing those practices. That we can remark upon how different our principles are from our ancestors' indicates that a cognisance of a rule, at least, may persist within a culture when the rule itself is no longer adhered to.

Seasonal Largesse Indeed...

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has announced a major shift in Government thinking today by recommending copyright term in sound recordings should be extended to 70 years... The move is a major victory for the music industry, which has been campaigning for term extension for years. It has consistently come up against the recommendations of Andrew Gowers, whose 2006 review of copyright stuck at keeping copyright at 50 years.

Music Week via the IPKat

This apparently sudden change in policy is currently leaving people mystified; according to the linked article the minister said '70 years is a fair length of term because he wants to see the benefits go back to performer [sic]', which I take to mean he isn't prepared to disclose his actual reasons. Burnham (previously noted for suggesting that the Internet should be regulated in a manner comparable to broadcast television) has been in the job for almost a year, yet his conversion to making people pay for longer for work already completed didn't come until the economic downturn; elsewhere today's stories are about potential pay cuts and job losses.

With the Heritage Protection Bill missing in action, thus removing a major item from the Culture Secretary's calendar, perhaps the Devil has found some work for idle hands to look busy with.

No Poet Did This

So soon after the last tale of dictionary rejects, a couple of days ago came news about recent changes in the O.U.P. Junior Dictionary; and the publishers have done themselves no favours by supplementing the reasonable observation that they have to enforce limits on the size of the book with an attempt to characterise the loss of a number of words pertaining to Christianity as a consequence of multiculturalism.

This would be easier to swallow if some of the neophyte words in the dictionary were drawn from backgrounds other than Western Christianity; but in fact the list of additions leaves me with the impression that it's targetted very much at arid educational requirements which are, perhaps, concerned more with the idea of multiculturalism than with actual cultures, actual people. I don't know whether children who can no longer look up vicar will have any more luck with imam, but it appears they will now be able to find interdependent, conflict and negotiate. For those needing to follow political discourse or employ technological or statistical terms, additions like citizenship, database and block graph will doubtless be useful.

Looking at the list of removed words, though, I have to wonder whether those not growing up in 'semi-rural environments' really are so much less concerned than I (a child of the suburbs) was with the world beyond their urban surroundings. I can remember when the Internet was supposed to open up new vistas not only of communication but also of information—to be an enabling resource for people who might have wanted to know about leopards and ravens, emperors and goblins, holly and monasteries. Even as someone who deals in philosophical abstractions daily, I'm nervous about the apparent shift from things out in the world to ways of knowing and talking about and organising them: food chains instead of the names of creatures, generic committees replacing offices of Church and Crown, databases to classify things while the things themselves become secondary. It brings Heidegger too much to mind. Besides the question of our heritage and, generally, of knowing something about the world outside your doorstep, there's also the matter of the power to evoke: it's useful to know what a chatroom is, but will that knowledge stimulate the lyrical imagination as much as the elves?

If I Read Happier Literature, People’s Achievements Might Set Off More Uplifting Trains of Thought...

A farmer in southern Lebanon has dug up what might be the heaviest potato in the world.

"This giant weighs 11.3 kilos (24.9 pounds)," Khalil Semhat told the AFP news agency at his farm near Tyre, 85 kilometres (50 miles) south of Beirut.
B.B.C. News

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop... Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous... That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

Interesting Timing

Economics research in the UK is exceptional by international standards, second only to the US, according to an independent international benchmarking review published last month by the Economic and Social Research Council. It identifies microeconometrics as an area where the UK has attained 'world leadership' and also highlights labour economics, public economics and economic development as areas where the UK is excelling. But it says there is room for improvement in macroeconomics.
Times Higher Education

Tactless

Quoth the B.B.C. on the nature of time:

But what is time? How do we measure its passing? Does it always tick at the same rate? Did it have a beginning, and will it ever end?

These are questions that might seem better placed in a philosophy course, but in fact they are immensely important, not only for understanding our place in the universe but also for the functioning of the 21st Century world.

What is the meaning of this 'but'? If metaphysical questions are important, in any sense of the word 'important', surely it follows that metaphysics, a branch of philosophy, is important in the same sense. Yet the quoted paragraph seems to imply that (practical?) importance constitutes disqualifiation from fitness for philosophical education.

A charitable interpretation is that temporal metaphysics is being recommended for Philosophy courses and outside academia—but it could have been better put.

My Post Advocates a ☐ Mocking ☑ Cynical ☐ Credulous Respose to Curious Statistics

The E.U. has claimed that 'half of all Internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography'. This claim is attributed to 'recent reports', but without any citation. What qualifies as 'Internet crime'? The press release cites among other examples the undying problem of spam, as does the Home Office definition.

It's hard to find reliable, up-to-date estimates of the volume of spam being sent, but back in June 2007 some estimates had it at almost 100 billion spam messages per 24 hours—and that's just one segment of 'Internet crime'. By contrast, in 2006 the U.S. Department of Justice was claiming that 'there are estimated to be more than one million pornographic images of children on the Internet, with 200 new images posted daily'.

It would therefore be helpful to know which 'recent reports' are being referenced. The I.W.F., in its 2007 Annual Report, states regarding trends in 2007 that the number of sites tracked by it, under three thousand, 'has remained relatively static for a number of years', although it 'do[es] not attempt to count individual images in circulation' (or use of other protocols, presumably). Meanwhile, the current N.E.M.E.C. annual report gives the total number of cumulative reports received by the end of 2006 at 441,900+. (This is the same body that cited a 2003 estimate according to which 20% of online pornography was pædophilic: they aren't traditionally reticent about stating estimated volume if they can.)

Anything that's at least as voluminous as spam must, to have 'quadrupled in the last five years', have been disseminated at something approaching 25 billion items per day in late 2003, given our working assumptions about spam volume. Yet that's 125,000,000 times the 2006 D.o.J. figure. Either our definitions (probably of 'Internet crime') need clarifying, or something is afflicting the process of estimation.

To Be Followed By a Trinitarian Theory of the Space Trilogy?

On the basis of a short newspaper article I can't tell whether the astrological theory of Narnia criticism has any legs (though given the risk of confirmation bias, I'm pessimistic); but part of the article certainly has me scratching my head:

Each of the seven [Chronicles of Narnia] is based on one of the seven planets that comprised the heavens in medieval astrology, says a scholar... The explanation comes after more than five decades of literary and theological debate over whether Lewis devised the fantasies with a pattern in mind or created characters and events at random.

I don't think any novels have their characters and events settled on at random; leastways, I struggle to bring cases to mind. Automatic writing? Dependent on whatever lurks in the subconscious. 'Choose your own adventure' books? The dice roll will at most determine which pre-designed events occur and in what order, with perhaps a little further variation within planned, predictable constraints. Random prompt generators? They give you only an outline. Monkeys on typewriters and an infinite period of time? It's doubtful that they can be said to 'create characters and events'.

In fact, there's only one genre that seems even halfway there: biography.