Subjectivity in an Era of Scientific Imperialism:
Shadows in an Age of Reason

 Harry Hillman Chartrand ©
Journal of Arts Management and Law
Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 1988

We have paid a terrible price for our education, such as it is. The Magian World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are merely clockmakers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars are just cud-chewers or system grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course, wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous, but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.

Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy: World of Wonders,
Macmillan, Toronto, 1987, p. 836.

Introduction

As the twentieth century draws to a close, troubling signs cloud the dawning of the new century and millennium.  Three hundred years into the Age of Reason, opinion polls indicate that nearly half of the population believes in UFOs, astrology, and, more recently, the New Age Movement.  A significant part of society is fundamentalist Christian and accepts as divine truth a book written in ancient Aramaic and Greek, translated into Latin and from Latin into English, French, and other modern languages.  Many are creationists who are convinced that the world was created ex nihilo seven thousand years ago and who actively seek equal time in the classroom with what they consider to be the secular myth of evolution.  The drug epidemic (including alcoholism), so close to the hearts of morally self-righteous politicians, infects a population that cannot, or will not, cope with the stresses and strains of modern life except through escape into hedonism and temporary oblivion.  The scientific method, applied to the outer material world, has taken humanity to the moon and beyond. It has given us a collective vision of the Unus Mundus - One World, One People, One Biosphere.  The inner world of feeling, intuition, and sensation, however, has not been, and perhaps cannot be, domesticated or tamed by scientific reason alone.  In fact, after three hundred years of enlightenment and the scientific method, we live in a world riddled by superstition, irrational beliefs, and ideological fanaticism.  As noted by the bard of the cultural revolution, Bob Dylan, "Something is going on, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?"

Where in this muddled inner world of mind and motivation is university research?  It is caught in a web of scientism-of scientific English, political science, the science of political economy, and all the other so-called human sciences.  Reductionist methods, however, developed for the study and control of the outer material world, have generated few convincing insights to soothe the troubled heart of this post-modern era when applied to the subjective reality of the Self.

There are few remaining sectors of secular society that continue to address the inner world.  The most important of these is the arts. Art defines the inner drama of the individual.  It provides meaning in an age without apparent value beyond basic greed.  Even our understanding of the arts, however, has been reduced to popular myth like the Gulag and Garret Myth: Great Art is the Product of Economic Deprivation or Political Oppression.  It is only in the last century that this belief has held sway over the public imagination.  Before that time, art was an integral part of life, not some separate and mysterious field of human endeavor.

It is this paradox of an age apparently dominated by science and technology in which irrational beliefs hold sway over a significant proportion of the population that provides the context of this article.  These irrational beliefs cast a shadow on this age of reason and raise questions about the adequacy and relevance of university research.  This paradox represents the other side of the coin involving business and governmental questioning of the performance of universities in job training and the application of university research for economic purposes.  To a degree, we are dealing with a situation similar to that identified by Goethe in his rebuttal to Newton's wavelength theory of color (Goethe 1810).  Color is not just a physical phenomenon of photons or waves (yet even in scientific terms, the wave/particle paradox of light must be recalled). It is also a subjective phenomenon involving how we see and understand the world around us.  Our understanding is incomplete and misleading if we accept only one side of the coin.

The theory of colours . . . has suffered much, and its progress has been incalculably retarded by having been mixed up with optics generally, a science which cannot dispense with mathematics; whereas the theory of colours, in strictness, may be investigated quite independently of optics. (Goethe 1810: para 725) 

It is in this sense that three paradoxes concerning the arts will be explored.  First, the increasing prominence and social importance of the artist in a scientific age will be considered.  Second, the fact that the subjective, intangible arts are now a significant force within the economy will be outlined.  Finally, an exploration will be made of the paradox that the university (the nominal center of research in contemporary society) may be ill equipped to conduct arts research.

A distinction must be drawn here.  Arts research can be defined as an investigation of alternative ways and means of creating art.  This is the domain of faculties of fine arts. Arts research can also be defined as the transdisciplinary application of social scientific methods and techniques to the study of the arts and artistic phenomena.  This second definition will be examined in this article, and, in this sense, arts research is a sub-field of policy research.

PARADOX 1: FROM ANONYMITY TO CELEBRITY

In a scientific age characterized by standardization and uniformity, it is a paradox that the idiosyncratic identity of the artist has become a dominant force within contemporary society.  The evolution of culture has been characterized by progressive division of labor and differentiation of social function until contemporary culture today can be defined as greater than the sum of various differentiated sub-cultures, including the arts, crafts, economics, fashion, heritage, language, law, multiculturalism, politics, religion, science, and sports.  Within the arts, there has been a parallel development characterized by the progressive individualization of the artist from anonymity to celebrity.

In traditional societies, awe and mystery surround the created object into which the creator projects spirit and soul.  In Japan, for example, reflecting an ancient tradition of animism, a sword, which is a product of mental work, is regarded not merely as a material object but as having been imbued with the author's living spirit.  Furthermore, objects of worship are not limited to visible and concrete things.  Even a word can have a spirit (Koisumi, 1977: 12).  In the Occident, only vague hints of ancient animism remain in concepts such as the moral rights of creators.

The numinosity of artifacts among pre-literate peoples reflects an investment of what Carl Sagan calls extra-somatic knowledge, that is, knowledge carried outside of the body (Sagan 1977).  Such knowledge can, by analogy, be considered to be the social genetic that directs the evolution of human society.  It is the knowledge passed from one generation to another.  Today it is embodied in books, recordings, computer software, and other contemporary sources to transmit knowledge to future generations.

In pre-literate societies, such knowledge is transmitted orally through the mnemonics of ritual and chant enforced through religious practice and taboo.  The association of rhythmic or repetitively patterned utterances with supernatural knowledge endures far back into historical times.  Among the early Arabic peoples, for example, the word for poet was sha'ir - the knower, a person endowed with knowledge by the spirits (Jaynes 1978).

In such societies, innovation depends upon the insight of the creator and his or her ability to ensure the integrity of mnemonic instruction, whether in the form of incantation or epic poem.  Cause and effect are not distinguishable.  Desired results are achieved through the unchanging enactment of ritual.  Science and art are one.  How to make something and the thing that is made are mystically unified.  Process and product are identical.  To name a thing is magically to control it.

In fact, the distinction between economy and culture does not exist in such societies.  To the Balinese, for. example, artistic knowledge is not restricted to a special intellectual class.  The Balinese have no words for art or artist.  Making a beautiful offering, carving a temple gate, or playing a musical instrument - all are tasks of equal aesthetic importance produced anonymously and done entirely in the service of society and religion with no thought of personal gain (Morris 1982).

How different the case has become in contemporary Western civilization.  In the Ancient World and during the Middle Ages, the identity of the artist was seldom known.  The great cathedrals were built anonymously by artist engineers who combined the mystical arts and sciences of the guilds.  In the Renaissance, the scientist and artist were still one person, but personal identity became attached to the works of the proverbial Renaissance man.

Beginning, however, with the Enlightenment and the republican revolutions of the eighteenth and the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth centuries, a divergence appeared between scientific and artistic ways of knowing.  The romantics, followed by the art for art's sake movement, consciously and deliberately separated the arts from an increasingly industrialized dehumanized society (Henderson 1984: 46).  This led the high arts and the artist to become increasingly isolated from mainstream society (Bell 1976: 13-14).

Within mainstream society, the scientific utilitarian ethic triumphed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The anonymous and ubiquitous industrial object displaced the individualized, hand-made, subjective work of art.  In the Communist world, this was called Socialist Realism.  In the Capitalist world, it was called bauhaus, or the international style of architecture.

During this period, the increasingly obscure aesthetics of high art, in which the label is the artwork (Wolfe 1974), became more and more alien to the average citizen.  In the high arts today, the artist has become the art object in new high arts disciplines such as performance art. (Hughs 1981).   In the commercial arts, the identity of the artist serves as the basis for emerging and controversial celebrity rights, which require payment to the artist or to his or her descendants for the right to imitate the artist's mannerisms or appearance for commercial purposes.  A fundamental dissonance remains today, however, between artistic and scientific ways of knowing.  To some, this dissonance is a threat to the long-term well-being of Western societies (Harmann 1979: 11).

PARADOX 2: FROM INTANGIBLE TO FACTOR OF PRODUCTION

It is a paradox that the arts are generally considered to be an intangible frill in a bottom-line economy, when in fact they have become a major force in the competitiveness of the economy.  To illustrate this point, consider that there are four distinct segments of contemporary art-the fine arts, the commercial arts, the amateur arts, and the applied arts.  The creative source in each is the individual artist.  The fine arts are a professional activity that serves art for art's sake, just as knowledge for knowledge's sake is the rationale for pure research in the sciences (Chartrand 1980).  The commercial arts are a profit-making activity that places profit before excellence.  The amateur arts are either a recreational activity that serves to re-create the ability of a worker to do his or her job or a leisure activity that serves to self-actualize a citizen's creative potential, thereby permitting him or her to appreciate life more fully.  The applied arts concern the application of the arts in business and the public sector, such as interior and product design, illustrating art, and copy writing and editing.

Each art activity is intimately interrelated.  The amateur arts, in actualizing the talents and abilities of the individual citizen, provide an educated audience and initial training for the fine and the commercial arts.  The fine arts, in the pursuit of artistic excellence as an end in and of itself, provide research and development for the commercial and the applied arts.  The commercial arts, in the pursuit of profit, provide the means to market and distribute the best of the amateur and the fine arts to an audience large enough and in a form suited to earn a profit.

Collectively, the fine, amateur, and commercial arts make up the arts industry, including advertising, broadcasting, motion pictures, the performing and visual arts, publishing, sound, and video recording.  Compared with the twenty-two main Canadian manufacturing industries in 1983, the arts industry was the largest, with more than 234,000 employees; the fifth largest in salaries and wages, with $3.1 billion; and the tenth largest in revenue, with $9.2 billion (Research & Evaluation 1987: 5-17).  Arts industry revenue was 2.4 percent of the Gross National Expenditure (GNE).  Using a GIVE multiplier of 2.1, the accumulated income multiplier effect of the Canadian arts industry was $19.3 billion in 1983, or 5 percent of the GNE.

Three fundamental demographic changes are contributing to growth in arts participation and the emergence of the arts as a significant factor of economic production.  These are rising levels of education, increasing participation of women, and the aging of the population.