From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 22:44:59 BST
Rick, Johnny, Platt,
Johnny said:
To harmonize or be beautiful, something has to be there for it to harmonize with -static patterns.
Rick said:
Agreed. Sometimes art is better when it conforms to our expectations (ie. "that dialogue sounded so real, that's just how I'd expect real people to talk"). On the other hand, we usually walk away disappointed when an artistic creation completely conforms to our expectations (ie. "that movie was so predictable, there wasn't one twist I didn't expect". It's about a balance of static and dynamic elements, a harmony of the expected and the unexpected.
Johnny said:
That balance of Dynamic and Static you refer to is a certain expected balance, there is a static pattern of how much to 'twist' a movie plot to make it fresh but familiar. The changes may seem like changes, but they are really just static patterns carrying forward and interacting with other patterns in expected ways.
Matt:
To me, this looks like subsuming DQ under static patterns, making it static patterns all they down--and all the way up. If history were simply a matter of static pattern forming in expected ways, I expect that we could come up with a science of history and predict the ways static patterns will form. This is the dead end that Marx led us down, the hypostatization of History. Rather than saying it's static patterns "carrying forward and interacting with other patterns in expected ways," I would say it's static patterns carrying forward and interacting with other patterns in _un_expected ways. You have the "static patterns carrying forward and interacting with other patterns" bit down, because if the future weren't our static patterns carrying forward in some manner, we wouldn't identify the future as being our future. A utopic vision of the future is one in which our patterns are carryed forward, but there's no way to predict what this will pan out to be. That's what DQ
is. Dynamic Quality is the unexpected burst of beauty, though according to convention it shouldn't be there. And because it shouldn't be there according to convention, we can't explain other than in retrospection, a post hoc rationalization. This ad hoc explanation is tuned to the particular instance of Dynamic Quality. What is a dead end is if we try to go transcendental and try and set an explanation of what all breaks with convention will look like. That's what I take the hypostatization of History to be: an attempt to outflank DQ and call it all convention, static patterns. That's why DQ is undefined. It only unfolds in history, leaving behind it waves of static patterns.
Matt
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