Function dysfunction

 

In the 1920s, left-leaning writers in Germany became enamoured of questions like: what is the function of art? What is the function of poetry? What is the function of the novel? Und so weiter. These questions were echoed in the Cold War period, and you still see the phrase “the social function of the novel” or the like in criticism.

Which leads to the question, naturally, of the function of ‘function talk’.

When everything has a social function, the underlying image is of society as composed of parts, each of which is programmed to perform for some purpose. As in a machine, the parts have, ideally, one program and one purpose. The gears in a watch are programmed to turn in synch with each other, and not to do the cha cha cha. I just had a problem with my mouse, and I went, as per a helpful Internet site, to the task manager and solved that problem – because my mouse was performing badly: it was dysfunctional.

This view of function has received some dents, however, in the design philosophy that has grown up around affordances. “Affordance” entered the vocabulary of design psychology by way of James J. Gibson, and like so much about design and psychology, it all started in World War II. Gibson worked for the air force, which had numerous questions about pilot to environment interactions. Thus, he was provided with plenty of funding to experiment. For instance, he experimented with the notion that objects become smaller as they become more distant and then disappear. According to Gibson, this confuses “smaller” with “indefinite” – for estimates of the size of the object at increasing distance did not fall under the qualities of smaller or larger, but under the category of ground to figure.  Nice gestaltist terms.

Given what Gibson called the ecological view of perception, we require some ecological view of function. A key sentence in Gibson’s book, The Ecological approach to Visual Perception, rather shatters the mechanistic view of parts and functions: “ I suggest… that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities.” As Gibson writes, further on, the term “affordance” is one he made up to refer to everything that implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. That means that perception, rather than translating immediately into a physical language of qualities, is immediately relative to the animal itself.  The physical world is first what it affords, for the animal.

To get back to our topic: in the view of the world expressed by the functional vocabulary, the program of, say, the novel is set by a positivist technology in which we have the epic, the novel, the film, the tv series, etc., each one supplanting the other. This is how critics have sometimes maintained that tv series have taken over the function of the novel. In fact, this view of the novel, in the U.S., was deeply embedded in the self-identification of novelists in the 50s through the 90s, and even now. Mailer, or Updike, or even Jonathan Franzen, in this ideology, write novels to capture something about America.

But, as many technological historians have pointed out, the idea of artifices that have one function supplanting each other in sophistication only works for some artifices, not for others. The bicycle did not die out with the advent of the automobile – although the horse and carriage did. The bicycle, the motorcycle, even, now, the motorized scooter all flourish. Television, despite my conviction that the computer would replace it, simply incorporated computer features. Poetry, far from being a dying art, is – if we look at songs as poems, which we should – one of the most flourishing of all arts. In combination with the radio and the car, poetry to a leap to a new niche. Similarly, in combination with audio technology, novels are now being read, in recording, to millions of drivers – thus, oddly, regaining a certain oral affordance novels used to have in cigar factories, when a person with the position of reader, a lector, read novels to occupy the hearing of cigar rollers. Although cars don’t “ “contain” bicycles, they contain an equivalent to the chain and the gearing that make bicycles work. Similarly, though tv series and movies don’t “contain” novels, they contain scripts that often come from novels. Walter Benjamin, that endless searcher, found this bit in his essay on Eduard Fuchs which I hold close to my heart:

“When the 1848 Revolution came, Dumas published an appeal to the workers of Paris in which he presented himself to them as one of their own. In twenty years, he had made 400 novels and 35 plays: he had been the source of the daily bread of 8,160 people.”

Dumas, in the end, lost, but his accounting – which encompassed the newspapers in which his stories were serialized, the printing presses that published them, the venders that sold them, the bookbinders and etc – and could have included the operas and plays made of them – gives us the very air of art, which is squeezed to death in an inventory of social “functions” that picks out and individualizes the “aesthetic.”

Function, function, what’s your junction, indeed. I’d prefer, in ongoing discussions of the function of art, that the word be spelled with a “k” – the funk-tion of art – because however scientific and engineering like the word function sounds, it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of affordances that you find in any playground, office or apartment.