Well, I just figured out something about Test Match cricket that I had never understood. There are lots of things that I don’t understand about cricket, because I have never bothered to learn the rules properly, but have just picked up what I have picked up by reading English schoolboy books and reading newspaper coverage of the international matches (which no more elucidate the basic rules of the game than our own newspapers will mention that the home team does not bat in the ninth inning if they are leading). Anyway, I hadn’t somehow realized that a team that bats first only wins a Test Match if they have managed to get the other team all out in both innings by the end of the fifth day. That is, my side can be ahead by a thousand runs, but if the sun goes down on the other side’s innings, it’s scored a draw. That means that I do not want my first innings to last for three days, even if I’m scoring like a madman. Which, in turn, leads to the strategy, where my side, having scored three hundred and fifty runs or so, will declare, take the ball, and start trying to get the other guys out. Declare too soon, of course, and you risk the other guys scoring more than you did, thus beating you in a particularly embarrassing manner. On the other hand, declare too late and you risk the other guys simply stalling for the rest of the match, leading to the match finishing as a draw with your three or four hundred runs intact.
This threw me for a loop (or knocked me for six, technically) because I assumed that one similarity between cricket and baseball was that they are leisurely games played without a clock. In fact, now that I study the matter, cricket is a leisurely game played with a clock, or at least with a sundial. All of the strategy is therefore totally different from baseball, not just because of the difference between a good batter scoring a hundred runs a year versus a hundred runs a game, but because clock management (or, rather, daylight management) must be as important in cricket as it is in football. Of course, there is something magnificently English about a five-day game where clock management is important, too.
I finally got on the trail of that little rule from reading Vic Marks in The Guardian. Also in my reading off the Guardian’s site today was a note from Germaine Greer about having received the Golden Bull award from the Plain English Campaign. It’s really a wonderful column, and it’s well worth skimming the comments as well.
It seems that the PEC wanted to mock the following sentence in Ms. Greer’s Guardian column of 23 October 2006: The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold. Now, if I had read the sentence in question (and I don’t think I did), I would, I hope, have immediately recognized that unsynthesised manifold must be a term of art, or at least of jargon, having some specific meaning in the field of aesthetics or philosophy. It turns out that it is, and like all good jargon, it is both impenetrable to outsiders and indispensable to insiders. That is, Ms. Greer could not easily have said what she meant in “Plain English”, because what she meant was a complicated reference to a complicated concept she could refer with jargon to rather than explain. Once that is understood, the rest of the sentence is certainly arguable (the first attribute? Surely the discontinuity is the least attribute?) and not far from clarity.
One interesting thing about the article and the comments circumjacent is that if the frame through which the Golden Bull is perceived is one of conservative attacks on intellectuals and intellectualism, then the Ms. Greer’s GB was a totally undeserved bit of snark that revealed more about the inadequacies of the PEC than it did about Ms. Greer. If, on the other hand, the frame is one of elite contempt for hoi polloi propped up by the timidity of the bullshit-calling boys of the press, then Ms. Greer’s response was a totally undeserved bit of snark that revealed more about the inadequacies of Ms. Greer than it did about the PEC. Hee Hee.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Basic philosophy should tell us that the first attribute of _anything we can possibly discuss_ is that there exists a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesized manifold. Otherwise we can’t discuss it, because it remains unsynthesized. Basic critical theory should tell us that an art object cannot create this discontinuity by itself — it can only do so at best in conjunction with the viewer.
I think this sentence has far more wrong with it than the phrase “unsynthesised manifold.” What is Ms. Greer trying to say? That if we can’t mentally process an object, it can’t be art? That being identifiable as more than environmental noise is a necessary precondition to being art? Whoop de doo. Are we meant to focus on the concept of discontinuity as being something stronger than the necessary and obvious categorical difference between that which is synthesized and that which is not? That’s not where the natural focus of the sentence lies, and neither is “unsynthesised manifold.” By drawing attention to her use of jargon in her follow-up column, Ms. Greer distracts from the utter lack of meaning in her original sentence. (That is, of course, one of the tempting and unfortunate reasons to use jargon.) She explores an actual idea in her follow-up column — the idea that an art object should be understood by viewers ignoring the art object’s context as fully as possible (“turn off as much of the incoming noise as we can”). It’s a bad idea, but at least it’s an idea. But even that little of an idea is hardly conveyed by her original sentence, which fails to reference the art object’s audience at all (except indirectly as the presumed non-synthesizers of the unsynthesized manifold).
Or, in plain English, I think Ms. Greer is full of crap and fully deserves a Golden Bull award. And an editor.
i thought i knew what the line meant. here’s the original paragraph:
Art does not exist to display the dexterity or industriousness of the artist, or the grandeur of his personality or that of his patron. Art can do all these things but that is not what makes it art. Art exists for no purpose beyond itself. The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold. It may do this merely by displaying a signature, or by sitting on a plinth, or by enclosing itself in a box or a frame. The work of painters for whom painting is a part of real life rather than art – Australian Aboriginal painters, say – has no frame, is painted in the sand, on a rock or a body, and is continuous with the painter’s reality. Until, that is, a dealer brings along a canvas, which the painter paints flat on the ground, moving round it rather than standing before it. When the dealer decides the work is finished, he grabs it, drives back to the city, frames it and puts a price on it, usually many times more than what he paid for it. Only then does it stop being life and become art. The work of art, or, as we now tend to say, the artwork, is first of all a commodity.
i don’t have the word to replace the WW of “unsynthesised manifold” here. but the point seems clear, that snooty art-market people have a different (and exclusive) concept of the manifold of sense from even ordinary artists’. does the phrase work, if the sentence is a mocking joke?
Having now read the full paragraph, I’d agree with Michael that the paragraph’s ideas are not so good.
My German philosophy is very rusty, but I think the “discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesized manifold” is Heidegger re-heated over the tepid flame of 1960s performance art: see, for example, “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger would, if I recall correctly, disagree with Greer in that he sees that the work of art makes itself: the emergence of its own being distinguishes it from “the unsynthesized manifold,” not the act of making it a commodity by putting a frame around it.
I admit that I think the paragraph was clumsily written. For one thing as the sentence in question is embedded in a paragraph that contains some irony, or at least some use of dry wit in saying things in such a way that the reader should be inclined to disagree with them. A sentence such as The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold doesn’t work well in the same paragraph as The work of art, or, as we now tend to say, the artwork, is first of all a commodity. Is one sentence meant to be taken as true and the other false? I think upon reflection they are both meant to be taken as false, and that the author in fact is rejecting if not mocking the entire idea of a first attribute of scare-quotes “Art”. This may not be a correct interpretation. So. The sentence is unclear, the paragraph is unclear, and I think the entire column is weak.
Still, I could probably (don’t make me) go through that day’s Guarniad and find five sentences or paragraphs that were at least equally unclear and muddled. Why give this one a Golden Bull? What’s the point of having an entire society devoted to mocking the art-critical intelligentsia? Is there insufficient intelligentsia-mockage in our world? Is Ms. Greer so influential that she must be taken down a peg for the good of the nation? She was not attempting to obfuscate or deceive. I would think that anybody who writes about contemporary art with any regularity would, with similar regularity, come out with some crap sentence or other that could well be worth mocking, if we are going to take the time to mock everything mockworthy.
It makes some distant sense to form a “Plain English” society to agitate against obscurantist or deceptive language coming from our government. It makes some distant sense for that group to expand its self-appointed jurisdiction to the newspapers, insofar as they accept and reinforce the language fed to them by politicians. Perhaps, even, such a group would find it appropriate to extend their reach to the press statements of Big Business, who have power and influence, and who often use unplain language to misrepresent the facts.
Germaine Greer?
Thanks,
-V.
Amusingly, this thread is now the top hit on google for unsynthesized manifold.