I think the answer to Michael's question (below) is twofold. One, those formal properties became an issue when people devised a concept of formal properties that was imagined as independent of any particular actuality. To find trustworthy evidence of that we need to turn to historical records and artifacts, tracing them back to some as yet unknown point where the talk about the concept is divorced from what demonstrated it. That means we can't go as far as prehistory or cave art because the people who made those images, looking formal to us, didn't leave a record of how or whether they had a concept of 'formal' as Michael uses the term. Personally, I tend to think that the cave painters of 30,000 B.C.E. did demonstrate the difference between formal, abstract concept and a particular expression of it not only because they had to paint their animal images from memory (in dim firelight) but generally seemed to have used natural bulges and cracks in the cave rock to as "suggestions" for particular animal shapes. Moreover, the flicker of small firelight could make those bulges and walls seem to move, thus accentuating the 'aliveness" of the surging, leaping animal forms. But my guess is just that, an interpretation and not a fact.
The other side of the answer is that the brain is now known to produce neural patterns -- they've been likened to a cluster of rubber bands -- that flex and shift through neural firings to evoke templates for our projected images of things in the world or even in imagination alone. Those 'rubber band templates' have wholeness and like a gestalt perhaps, enable us to 'see' units and shapes in a generic and then particularized way. The generic patterns are the formal shapes that contain or embrace numerous particular instances. Thus seeing a particular is a constructed result of being aware (make-believing) variations of a neural pattern/s. In this model the formal generality precedes the particular even though it is likely made up of many previously noticed (and constructed) particulars. The particular thing (or story of whale swallowing a man) is the abstraction from the general neural pattern, perhaps one we could call "big shape enclosing small shape" Lakoff and Johnson, in their seminal book, Philosophy in The Flesh, argue that such global metaphors -- like big encloses small -- are at the root of all cognition. No one knows when humans first began to recognize that their particular experiences are related to, and both nurture and are derived from mental concepts. But once people could imagine a concept as separate from a varying expression of it, and talk about it and record it, then fiction and science began as historical fact. As a human fact, unrecorded and unproven, it probably began at least with the cave painters and even well before them. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, August 29, 2011 11:12:18 AM Subject: Re: Fiction Michael Brady writes: > How did > the creators' interest in manipulating the formal properties supersede > the interest in the entire story or scene? It begs the question to > suggest that it all began with cavemen. I am interested in how that > cavemen or Assyrians or whoever it was realized that a tale of being > swallowed by a big fish was not far from telling a tale of the one that > got away and then to telling any tale that used the same formal > components, resulting in the attention and admiration of the audience > for the story itself, not for its orthodoxy, historical recounting, > didactic moralizing, etc. > > > > "I trust I make myself obscure?" > "Perfectly, Thomas." > > Michael -- You're probably less obscure than simply over my head. I've been imposing a simple-minded interpretation of your question as being essentially this: Did any caveman ever paint an image that was not simply an exact replica (as close as he could make it; or, who knows? -- SHE could make it) of something she'd seen? Such mysteries of prehistory fascinate and frustrate. Tell me again: Is there a practical reason (and there doesn't have to be) why you want to know when fiction/imagination first moved artists like painters and storytellers?
