Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

Sally Caves, On 28/06/2006 00:24:
> "Thinking outside the box" is a cliche, And.  I was not being reductive,
> trivializing or uninsightful.
It's not very fair to imply that I had said you were, since I so clearly and explicitly didn't...

> I was being sardonic, ;) and trying to
> point out, as I have in my previous posts, a basic truth: that even
> "thinking outside the box" is based on a prior box.  Maybe you could
> revisit my analogies with geology and evolution that were not sardonic.
> True, humans think and nature does not (or so we assume), and some
> humans think better and more originally than others and manage to change
> the landscape.  Is that really what we're trying to do in personal
> artlangs?  I liked your other comment better: that the lust for novelty
> arises from an impoverished sensibility, and that innovation was not a
> criterion for you in your appreciation of an artlang.  Surely there are
> subtleties in artlangs, like streets in a city, that make that city and
> that artlang novel to those who live in it.  See my other post on this
> matter.  God is in the details. Another cliche, but there it is.
Nobody has been saying that personal artlangs are trying to think outside the box or
reshape the landscape, and nobody has been saying that they should. Indeed, in
the other message of mine that you mention favourably is quite clear on that.

There is perhaps an inevitable tension in a discussion forum in which participants
are both producers and consumers of art. As consumers, there is a general
desire to engage in open discussion of aesthetic judgements. As producers,
there is a general countervailing need to prioritize praise and reticent tact.
(For instance: I subscribe, rather joylessly, to an email list whose membership
is mainly constituted by most of the main practitioners of avant garde poetry
in Britain, and that tension renders discussion largely inane, trivial and
flippant -- nobody can speak freely of their own readerly engagement with the
poetry the list is intened to discuss, since to do so provokes wounded
feelings, acrimony, and so forth.) In the case of conlanging, the picture is
further complicated by presence of producers and consumers of engelangs, among
whom a very different mode of discourse tends to emerge -- one in which the
focus is on rationally discussable ideas and in which the produc
er--consumer distinction and notions of ownership and amourpropre are of little importance.

So, the regrettable consequence of this is that on a list such this,
interlocutors' decency, generosity of spirit, innocent intentions, and so
forth, is not itself sufficient to guarantee the preservation of unruffled
harmony in their intercourse.

--And.
>
> Sally
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "And Rosta" <and.rosta@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 6:13 PM
> Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity
>
>
>> While it is true that the senses of 'original', e.g. as in 'original
>> idea', include both 'an idea that nobody else has ever had before' and
>> 'an idea of X's that X has not borrowed from somebody else', both
>> those senses are rather reductive, trivializing, uninsightful and
>> problematic. Surely more pertinent is the sense of 'original' that is
>> nowadays called 'thinking outside the box'. Sai was lauding conlangs
>> that think outside the box (but he was not, let us be clear,
>> implicitly criticizing ones that don't, which patently often have an
>> entirely different but equally rich array of merits).
>>
>> --And.
>>
>> Sally Caves, On 27/06/2006 22:14:
>>> Yes... for example, AllNoun preceded Sylvia's Kelen.  So did a
>>> variety of language experiments--Ray's filled me in there.  Sylvia
>>> may not have known about these, but it was still in osmosis, so to
>>> speak, in that some inventors have tried to break some kind of
>>> universal about language. I've even thought of a language that did
>>> away with nouns and was all verbs and adjectives.  I'm sure I'm not
>>> original. Musical language?  Lots of people, including myself,
>>> thought we'd come up with something original (wow! a language based
>>> on musical staves!) only to find that Francis Godwin had invented
>>> Lunarian in _The Man in the Moone_ (1668), with a language based on
>>> musical staves.
>>>
>>> So I suppose, if you factor in the "ignorance" element, all of us who
>>> came up with the idea of inventing a personal language prior to our
>>> having heard of any other such creators including Tolkien are being
>>> "creative."  But I tend to agree with David and Mark and others on
>>> this subject: it's all tinkering with a few explosions here and
>>> there, but you can't separate the explosions from the tinkering.
>>> What would be the point?  We live and create in a vast continuum of
>>> human life and invention.  Isn't it strange how suddenly a bunch of
>>> people will start musing about a certain "new" idea independently of
>>> one another?
>>>
>>> Sally
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Reed" <markjreed@...>
>>> To: <CONLANG@...>
>>> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 2:28 PM
>>> Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity
>>>
>>>
>>>> You can try all you want to do something entirely novel in your
>>>> conlang, but chances are you will fail.  Things only appear novel when
>>>> you're ignorant of their antecedents.  There's nothing *wholly* new
>>>> under the sun, and *all* creative endeavors are, at some level, "just"
>>>> tinkering with known elements. The distinction can only be made in
>>>> ignorance and is imo worthless.
>>>>
>>>> On 6/27/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
>>>>> On 6/26/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>>>>> > I'm also slightly annoyed by his demand that we ask "what
>>>>> evidence it
>>>>> would
>>>>> > take to prove our beliefs wrong."  I come from a school of thought
>>>>> that
>>>>> > prefers the dialectic to the binary--thesis, antithesis,
>>>>> synthesis, > rather
>>>>> > than off, on, zero one, right, wrong.  I guess I run on analog.
>>>>>
>>>>> Just as a short note - I don't see that he necessarily is binary at
>>>>> all - nor for that matter that his challenge is. (It's clearly
>>>>> directed, imo, at religious folk with tautological / closed-loop
>>>>> belief systems...)
>>>>>
>>>>> He is making a distinction between tinkering and creativity, or
>>>>> tinkering and neogenesis perhaps. One could call them both 'creative'
>>>>> in some sense, but I feel that the distinction is a worthwhile one,
>>>>> and reflected in how most folk do conlanging - by hearing about how
>>>>> some language does X, and incoprorating it or a small variation
>>>>> thereof. This, rather than thinking of entirely new ways of doing X,
>>>>> or choosing not to do X at all (viz. Kelen), or otherwise going
>>>>> outside of the usual scope of language.
>>>>>
>>>>> Which, as I said, is of course a plenty wide scope to start with. But
>>>>> I'm never one to be content with it just 'cause of that. :-p
>>>>>
>>>>>  - Sai
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>

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