Style, cleaning up a dirty word

Style is a way of doing something. Any way of doing something inevitably shows in what is done, it leaves traces. Stylistic analysis works backward, studying what was done in order to understand the way it was accomplished. Inevitably —no, let’s make that stronger: necessarily— stylistic analysis leads to a knowledge of the algorithms one could employ to reproduce what was done. As such through stylistic analysis, we eventually arrive at the subject of imitation. (See the appropriate section). More immediately, knowing what was done and how it was done gives us an understanding of how we got where we are, which is the fundamental question of history.

The central questions stylistic analysis tries to answer are:

1. What do things look like? And
2. How did they come to look like that?
   
   From there we move on to the questions
   
3. What does this tell us about the thing?
4. What does it tell us about its relationship to its environment? And
5. What does it tell us about us?
   
   All that is analytical. Now come the critical questions
   
6. How might what we have learnt be useful to us and why?
7. What do we like and why?
8. What do we think is good and why?
9. What ought we to do with what we have learnt?

We might conflate and rewrite the first two questions as follows: What gives something its identity?

Note the word ‘gives’. On the model that I work with, things do not acquire an identity without a knowing observer and interactor who is responsible for giving a thing its identity on the basis of their interaction with it and on the basis of their interaction with their environment (including the community they are part of).

We give things satisfying the right conditions an identity on the basis of the properties we attribute to them. The legitimacy of that attribution is based on our experience of the behaviour we observe or expect in the thing as it interacts with us and its environment.

What properties a thing has of itself, it will keep, also without the observer, (such as the organization of its matter) but an identity, which is generated when the world and the thing meets the observer half way in behaviour, is ‘activated’ by the knowing observer bringing thought to the thing under consideration.

Because we who invest things with identity are learning creatures who come to be through our differentiation from and interaction with the other, things acquire an identity only on condition that there is a community of knowing observers and interactors doing the business of bestowing identity and passing on their knowledge and thoughts to make that identity useful to us.

What things look like (I use the word look to include the image made by all senses as well as our experience interacting) and how they behave (what they do to be a certain shape or colour, how they prehend the forces acting upon them etc.) is in part a consequence of how the observer interacts with their environment to bestow identity on things. The world behaves, the thing behaves within that world. We are part of its world. It prehends our interaction, but we bring our knowledge and its limitations, our beliefs and assumptions, our perceptual and cognitive footprint to the thing.

This brings us back to the section on forming concepts. We differentiate behaviour within the universe, separate it out as different, we try to understand that difference in terms of the patterns of behaviour it shows in its environment under specific conditions (its properties) and conceptualize all that in images, images constructed by our perceptual and cognitive apparatus working together.

Ask yourself: how do you identify the things around you? Your mum; your bike; a brick; anger; your favourite pasta sauce; the style of a building, anything? Who has had a stake in giving these things the identity you bestow on them? What was required for you to give shape to that investment? If you were to reflect on these questions you will find it becomes quite an involved narrative.

In the end you identify a thing. Having bestowed an identity upon it by attributing properties to it, whilst learning, you now recognize your work in the thing identified. Familiar properties that you have learnt to identify from many aspects construct the image, or the thought, “Ah, there she is…” Properties are unique to particulars in their configuration. But each property in itself may be shared by other things. The horse may share its colour with a chestnut. The house may share its smell with an overcooked pot of brussels sprouts.

Because we are perceptually and cognitively limited creatures, the properties we attribute to things are limited to what we are capable of attributing to a thing. Each of us has our separate frame of reference, uniquely constructed by our learning path. This explains the difference between how a physicist might look at a thing and a carpenter, or a painter, or a parent, or a child. We each of us select what we know or imagine to be important at that moment on the basis of the possibilities our frame of reference has to offer further limited by the inferential paths we have learnt to beat through it.

What I have described so far confines itself to answering the first three bullet points in the list below of how a thing comes to be the product of a way of doing things.

1. the material it is made of, and the properties this exhibits in us
2. the organisation of that matter into a form and the way we perceive and conceive of this
3. the way it was made and how it arrived at being what it is now and what this tells us
4. the use or purpose we assign it and the meaning this gives the thing in our interaction with it

The last point transforms the thing from being an object of cognition to an object of use and value. If we imagine ourselves standing at the birth of the thing as a thing, say at the end of the production line in a factory. We can imagine ourselves at a crucial point along a river. Looking upriver we are shown how the thing is constituted as an object or relationship, event or situation. Then looking downriver we look at how the the thing is further elaborated as an object of experience at work in various events and situations where it comes together with other things in an environment. At this point desire (or its lack) enters in. If the product of our way of doing can be considered good for some use or purpose and is to our liking then an understanding the thing as the product of a way of doing becomes desirable knowledge. (In the section on wanting I give a description of what desiring means)

Now, we must remind ourselves that the desire to understand for the sake of understanding things is as much a purpose driven by desire as the desire to use something for some other purpose. It is just that some understanding of a thing is required for all uses. The engineer building the phone I use has a different understanding of it than I do. I understand as much as I am required to in order to make basic use of my phone.

If you look at the four ppints I just mentioned, many of you will have recognized Aristotle’s four causes. Which I will look at when I look at causality in a different section. What is interesting is how these four causes relate to Gottfried Semper’s definition of style.

He defined style as “the correspondence between the work of art and the history of its genesis”, which is just another way of saying that style is a way of doing things leading to a thing done in which that way of doing things is somehow implicit.

He further identified three factors that cause a thing to have the appearance it does. When I use the word appearance please be aware that this is meant in the sense of the cognitive image as composed by all our senses as well as our experience of our bodily/congitive interaction with the thing in our environment.

According to Semper style is influenced by three factors:

1. Material-technical factors: how things are made and with what materials
2. Socio-cultural factors: how the technology of making is embedded in the culture of a community or period
3. Individual and ideological factors: how an individual person of genius may use the first two factors to find their own response to them.

You will perhaps acknowledge that Aristotle’s fourth cause is implicit in all three points. The first because you can ask why things are made in the first place. The second because it appears that technologies of making are embedded in cultures and in the third point because personal ideologies and beliefs influence the making of a thing or artefact.

What is crucial here is that these same factors are mirrored in the experience of the work by the beholder/user of the thing. In this way the ‘genesis of the work of art’ is further ‘completed’ or ‘elaborated’ in our experience of it. As such at least two people are responsible for making the thing: the craftsman/artist/designer for the upriver part and any person crafting their expereince of it. For that person’s experience of the artwork to be filled out, it would help them to form an image and an understanding of the work and how it was made according to the three factors above or according to the four cause of Aristitle. But, and this is important, that knowledge will always be at best partial and it will be further elaborated and added to in the making of the experience of the object.

So we could pass along the three points again with regard to the way the thing becomes part of an experience to us that involves the context or environment in which it is experienced. What are the material and formal conditions in which the work presents itself to us? How does it behave and how does its environment behaves as a result of its interaction with the thing? How is the evaluation of the thing affected by the socio-cultural factors in which the viewer is embedded? What is the viewer themselves capable of in experiencing the thing? And within what bedding of ideas is the thing received? The three factors of Gottfried Semper lead to an understanding of the work in its interaction with us and the context in which it is interacted with.

Upriver where the phrase ‘history of its genesis’ refers to the manufacture of the thing by the artist things will necessarily acquire a style automatically because all ways of doing leave their signature. Downriver, where the phrase ‘history of its genesis’ might refer to the work’s further ‘becoming’ in our experience of it, it will necessarily have to be understood in terms of its style, that is if we are to develop an experience of it at all. But that style will now include not just the artist’s making, but the making of experience.

If all these factors determine the style of whatever we conceive of as the whole, we can see then that style is something that any ‘thing’ must acquire in order for us to be able to identify and interact with it. An apprehension of the style of a thing is a necessary precondition for our intentional interaction with it, a knowledge of a thing’s style both in the manufacture of the thing (which is always, at least partly, a conceptual affair as well as an affair involving matter and form and tools and such, see the section on making things)

Semper concentrates on works of art made by man. The question is whether the distinction between the artificial (that which is made by man) and the rest, the natural for example, is tenable. Things not made by man also have an identity given them by those who intentionally interact with them. Things to become things at all are artefacts of human perception and cognition working on the behaviour of the world. In this sense, man’s efforts in making things cannot reasonably be kept separate from the production and consumption of all nature with which man interacts. The mirrored relationship between the maker and the user/observer, brings not only the artificially made within the sphere of style-assigning-identification, but anything we interact with. In any case the distinction between the artificial and the natural is weak at the best of times.

How do those who are intent on seeing the works of human beings as separate from the works of the rest of nature cope with the following arguments? 1. That nature produced us therefore we are products of nature and what we do is natural and becomes our extended phenotype. 2. That there is no evidence, apart from a beautiful and ancient story to indicate that we are in any way special and separate from nature.

What we produce cannot in any non-trivial way be distinguished from what any other organism produces except perhaps through the notion of intentionality. But there are other animals who act intentionally, so even there we appear to be different only with regard to our bodily abilities which define our skills, cognitive make up and umwelt and attitude.

We may not like what we are doing to ourselves and our environment, but what we do is natural to us, just as it is natural for a puffin to live on a rock covered with its own excrement. Not all of nature is pretty, or of benefit to itself or other parts of it. Nature is an agonistic dynamic developing thing. Our thinking is shaped by our understanding (however adequate), our beliefs (true, justified and other) and our taste in all things.

Not only is nature and artifice an interesting and problematic distinction but the idea of art also needs to be addressed. Art is a word that must define anything we do. (see the section on art and science) As such all human endeavour catagorises itself into a list of arts which includes any intentional activity we can come up with. So there is the art of doing science, the art of writing academic papers, the art of handling a hammer and chisel and so forth. As such, for ‘work of art’ in Semper’s brilliant definition of we can substitute ‘any artefact’, or indeed ‘any thing’ as all experience of our world needs to be constructed: concepts are artefacts that are the products of the art of cognition. And, do not be mistaken, there is an art to that. And for ‘technology’ we can substitute ‘the generative processes of nature’, which will include technology as developed by man as well as the spider making her web and indeed the mechanics of the buzzing fly caught in it.

I see the need to keep humanity distinct, as I see the need to differentiate everything that it is useful to differentiate. I see no need to keep human beings and what they do separate from what nature is and does. We are all part of the same system, whatever our comforting stories tell us. We are born of nature and we behave naturally in everything we do.

If that sounds opprobrious and distasteful it might help to de-romanticize and de-sentimentalize our conception of nature and not equate ‘nature’ automatically with ‘the good’ and the artificial with ‘the bad’ or nature with what we accept without question and the artificial which (naturally) raises our critical acumen. Nature in this story just is the universe doing its thing and everything is part of that universe.

So where have we arrived? I think we have arrived at a slightly, almost insignificantly adapted view of style as given by Giambattista Vico in his Scienza Nuova, of 1725, 1730 and 1744. He discusses the profound importance of style within the context of language, where indeed it belongs. But it belongs not just in language as a vehicle for poetry, rhetoric and literature, it does not only belong in the tone and mood of political speeches, it belongs to language as the vehicle of human thought, of perception and cognition and intention.

Style as an understanding of what we do and the way we do it, is fundamental to our understanding.

Much of our conversation is about questions of style even though it is often masked, either deliberately, because the word style is avoided as a dirty word. In such conversations it is fun to see the devices thought of to keep the elephant in the room invisible.

Or it is masked inadvertently because many conversations about style do not think of themselves as conversation about style even though they are.

All conversations about method are essentially stylistic conversations. So are all political and ideological conversations in which one party differentiates itself and the way it like to do things or what it wants to produce from its opposition, fro example republicanism, communism, neo-liberalism, socialism. Religions is determined by style: Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity in the form of Catholicism, Protestantism, Lutheranism, and so forth and so forth. Many philosophical conversations are explicitly stylistic using styles of thinking such as consequentialism, utilitarianism, nominalism, realism, idealism, etc. Styles of doing things and their products are what define our conceptualised environments.

Thought is something that in its act of behavioural differentiation and causal and modal synthesis, assigns stylistic properties to things by which it can identify the particular through the typification of the (conceptually existent) universals it shares in. Style is a basic ingredient of human thought and things are assigned a style in our thinking. As such style is the most profound knowledge one can achieve of a thing. It sets up a thing’s causal and modal conception. An idea of style is a necessary ingredient in the formulation of theory to determine practice.

The analytical study of style looks upriver to understand what we do and how we do it. The critical engagement with style uses that understanding to begin to build the bridge of theory. (see the section on theory)

Anything I make whether it be conceptual (e.g. a thought) or more tangible (e.g. a chair) can be stylistically analysed. In other words, any artefact be it purely conceptual or conceptual and more , acquires a style automatically in that it will contain forensic traces of the way it was made and why it was made like that. And if there aren’t any, then we have our imagination to imagine how and why it was made. Stylistic analysis allow me to understand the genesis of an artefact.

It may be strange but stylistic analysis achieves understanding by making the process of reproduction repeatable. It allows us to develop an algorithm for a thing’s (re)production. This crucial fact comes to dominate our critical interaction with style.

Our critical engagement of style relates our understanding of wholes and their working parts and their implications for us and ours.

There are a number of questions we need to address here.

1. How is our understanding of a style useful to us?
2. How does use generate value?
3. What happens when we value the pursuit of value itself? Or, what happens if it is our style to pursue the acquisition of style?
4. Should we ever pursue style for the sake of having a style or is it best to concentrate on doing things well and letting that determine our style?

Understanding the way a style works, i.e. develops helps us understand the foundational question of history: how did we get here? For this stylistic analysis is necessary. Stylistic analysis is an objectifying activity whereby we make objects of everything involved in the genesis of a thing, artefact, event, experience or situation. The artefact is analysed along the lines of Semper’s basic categories: material/technological; social/cultural and individual/ideological. The artist is held along the same ruler and fully objectified in the analysis regarding intentions, ambitions, failings, skills, attitudes and the patterns and contingencies of their life. A similar treatment is done with regard to the environment of both and so the image forms of a genetic development forms. First the genesis of the artefact itself is analysed then the reception of the artefact and its ‘life’ as a thing engaged with. Some of the most beautiful historical and stylistic analysis is philosophically profound such as the work of Semper himself who came up with the brilliant notions of the four elements of architecture and the Stoffwechseltheorie. Alois Riegl who refused to see history as the naive march of progress and instead tried to see development in the light of challenges from which style emerged, in which each phase required appreciation on its own terms.

As we acquired a tool for systematic analysis, everything became analyseable as an algorithm, or a recipe. An understanding of Baroque architecture came in the form of a recipe for making Baroque architecture together with an historical explanation of the ideology and an explanation of the (artistic) technologies that formed the preconditions for the emergence of style.

Having learnt that everything can be analysed historically in stylistic terms and seeing explanation in the form of recipes and ideological contexts, a next step was to reflect upon oneself in the light of the other. “Look”, was the wistful observation: “the Greeks and Romans, the Renaissance and the Baroque, everyone has their own style! what about us? We have learnt the recipes and we cook well using them, but who are we?” This Angst of a lack of identity of having an identity that was supposedly ‘borrowed’ caused a weird but interesting shift in our thinking. It created a ressentiment as Nietzsche would have put it, a self-consuming reaction whereby the anxious pursued the reward rather than what the reward was supposed to be for. We see it a lot. The prize is supposed to be a reward for good work. But once the prize becomes desireable for itself, people perform work to get the prize. So it was with style. It was a style people wanted and this was pursued over and above the proper objectives of good architecture. The production of good buildings, good cities and healthy environments were made secondary to the pursuit of style and, to make the joke complete, style became invested with the promise of health, flourishing and good cities. Tried and tested means were thrown overboard to fill the world with untested ideas (buildings are far too expensive for proper evidence based research. We live in living labs often badly understood). No architects (and they are far from being alone so don’t think I am getting at them, all other forms of human endeavour know the same problem with often disastrous consequences) wanted something rather trivial “a style of our own”. I think is was secretely realised which is why style became a dirty word, something that was the product of ‘mere’ imitation, whilst ‘modernism’ became a tyranical thing.

And they soon got it. A whole series of styles was invented: Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Functionalism or the International Style, or De Stijl itself. It was from the possession of style that the architects again could concentrate on more important things, but little did they know that they had in fact sold their soul in the process of their search for style. Style messianic. Modernism would save the world. In fact the modern architect had fallen into the trap so well warned about by Philibert de L’Orme’s book: desinging wastelands where no one except those with enough money wanted to be. Teaching through idolisation of the great and indoctrination rather than through gentle questioning. And fostering imitation whilst calling it something differnt. No style has been more encouring of bland imitation than Miesian and Corbusian modernism, without their incredible talent. Modernism and mediocrity do not do nearly so well as classicism and mediocrity. Brutalism and mediocrity is just simply a toxic mix that has much to answer for.

What is not realised is that great models can be analysed stylistically in two ways (see also the section on imitation) We can analyse the product and find recipes from making similar products, or we can analyse the doings, the processes if you like, and then abstract from that what is needed to get what you want. That is what happened. The work of early archaeologists discovering the stofffwechsel theorie at work in the marble temples of Greeece which had been transltated from wood inspired Bötticher, Semper and Viollet-le Duc to create a context of understanding how a new material requires new technologies, that will be discovered by individuals with great ideas and so be embedded socially and culturally, but not after a battle in which extant traditions compete with the new. Style just is the product of a way of doing.

A new material and its attendant technologies can be artistically explored for possibilities.

Artistic exploration of an emerging style as the product of a new material or structural system and its attendant technologies allows for variations to emerge within a set of game rules that stylistic analysis can reconstruct.

Artistically speaking when the variations have been exhaustively explored, the style, having gone through various phases of development, such as for example, early, classic, late/baroque, atavistic (a return to ‘first principles’ as exhibited by the work of Abbé Laugier) new and modern, postmodern etc a new material with its attendant technologies or a new structural principle with its new possibilities will emerge.

Artistic success in this sense is defined by the idea of something becoming iconic of a period, for being ‘ahead of its time’ (i.e. immensely influential) or treasured for the harmony it managed to achieve, or the excitement in its movement or whatever. The full panoply of possible judgments might be unleashed in the careful judgment of art.

In manufacturing terms a style is successful if it is brought to standardized production. Great design products are or were great because they managed to show great continuity and steadfastness in a changing world: a BIC biro, the IKEA Billy, the Volkswagen etc.

And the fact is, that although style is a dirty word, within another context is is a great compliment. There is no greater compliment that saying: ‘She’s got style” And what does one have if one has it. Nietzsche gave the anwer:

“One thing is needful. – To “give style” to one’s character – a great rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them to an artistic plan.. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime.. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art”¹

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (“la gaya scienza”) (1882) ↩︎

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