All written expression--not just fiction and poetry, but also the everyday writing we do for work or personal correspondence in the form of letters, reports, papers, emails, social media posts, or blogging--has the potential to become aesthetic, showing the same general pattern common to all aesthetic experiences. When the process comes together, it begins with (a) a tension, need, or puzzlement that requires communication and is driven by (b) the anticipation of a result that makes the work of expression compelling. The work itself is colored by (c) deep engagement with (d) the immediate act of composition and, perhaps, preliminary research. Composition can be highly immersive, with its both rational and sensual qualities (e.g., opening and framing, structure, word choice, tone and voice, use of metaphors and other signs, phrasing, sentence structure, etc.). Finally, written expression creates gratification when the outcome has (e) a resolution that makes it satisfying to readers and the author. The outcome can at times feel profoundly meaningful and rewarding, resolving deep questions or conflicts, or explaining things in new and more effective ways. This potential for discovering meaning (not just sharing it) might have driven the urge to write.
Admittedly, writing can also be tedious and painful. Unlike most other activities with aesthetic potential, which are largely voluntary, almost all of us are at times forced to write. The pain can come about because what we are writing holds no interest to us, we don’t feel comfortable with our level of writing skill (particularly in a non-native language), or that we don't foresee a value in the result, no matter how skillfully we perform the task. Yet many people find it highly rewarding to tackle almost any writing project because they have discovered its aesthetic potential. Like swimming, which is a lot of work and even frightening to some, writing is avoided as a painful chore by many people. Yet a devout swimmer seeks to increase the challenge by swimming farther and faster, just as a devout writer might feel compelled to tackle a writing task on a topic that is relatively unknown (such as the case of many journalists), requires a lengthy treatment, or takes a unique point of view for the writer.
When it becomes aesthetic, the act of writing can seem to be guided by unconscious or exterior forces, like the collective unconscious, muses, or a private genius, because it is no longer just a goal-driven process, but also one of imagination and surrender to unexpected connections. We may not even recognize the source of our words or ideas, coming from forgotten conversations and readings, or from truly creative places. They might come to us in waves of coherent phrases or growing swells of ideas that seem to break and crash on the page in front of us out of our control. Writing can feel a little like swimming in an unpredictable surf.
At other times, it is only us. We know we are the only agent at work, and writing might draw from the deepest resources we own to meet the challenge. Writing can at times be like solving an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, an arduous but absorbing task of finding the right pieces and fitting them in just the right arrangement to create the effect we are after, or creating new pieces, carving them out of raw materials to custom fit. When we complete the puzzle, the sight can make us ebullient, either as we imagined it and struggled to get to, or something much more than we imagined. But we own it as something that only we could have achieved.
Alternatively, writing might feel like squeezing blood from a stone--each word and sentence a futile effort. We face the task with little hope or expectation for reward, and we surrender, resorting to perfunctory statements just to have something written.
When it is working, though, writing can create an all-absorbing flow, or undertow, not unlike more physical activities in which we lose attention of our surroundings, and we focus only on the growing words and sentences in front of us, considering how to fit them together to further our argument, explanation, description, or story. Writing calls for a variety of fortitudes. Words can be rational, but also emotional, sensual, and even ecstatic--useful for the full range of experience. And we can’t forget that words themselves represent sounds, and are not just characters on a page. They create music in the mind. For some, writing can be as expressive as singing.
Aesthetic outcomes can be achieved in any form of writing and are not reserved only for poets and novelists. However, much of what we write is rote, made up of boilerplate language we have repeated or heard others repeat many times, filled with clichés meaning little to anyone, and just adequate to fulfill the task. Some everyday writing tasks may simply be a gesture, like a thank you note, or a record, documenting a few facts, paying respects, or making an opinion known, and not an attempt at deeper expression. But everyday life offers many reasons to immerse ourselves in the act of writing to create something of richer value with bigger potential repercussions.
Written expression shares a quality that is common to other aesthetic experiences that end with a tangible outcome (e.g., gardening, collecting, taking photos, cooking, etc.)--the product itself is animate and has aesthetic potential for others, making it closer to the world of Art. Since literature is one of the seminal artforms, this is not surprising. Reading a well written work can bring not just new understanding, but deep emotional resonance, and also wonder and enjoyment of the language and text that gets readers there. When we express ourselves in words (or in any other medium for that matter), we create a world of meaning that assumes a life of its own arising from the words themselves, even if we see ourselves as the source. In fact, once we hit “send,” “publish,” or sign off on publication, we have decided to share ownership of those words and the eventual reader becomes owner of a new, proprietary interpretation. This “life of its own” quality is another reason that writing is often seen as collaborating with supernatural entities.
Expression as transaction
Despite common notions, expression is not simply a process of spilling out our thoughts and emotions (or those of guiding spirits) with little care for the reader. Expression is a collaboration, or transaction, with both our readers and the world we experience.
Firstly, expression is always committed toward an audience that demands our consideration, not just for oneself, so it is from the start a sort of transaction. The model reader theory of Umberto Eco suggests that a text is necessarily full of open spaces that the reader must fill in, and the author needs to consider how a typical reader will do this. Not just any reader, but one toward whom the text is directed. Every text “demands cooperation.”
Secondly, in a very real sense, expression does not begin inside us, but in our experience--in the transactions we have with the world. It begins in the world within which we are just one actor (see Dewey, 1925), albeit a critical one. Any expression is first a process of co-mingling with the world (we might call this impression, or, literally, pressing in), and only after this can the work of expression begin (literally, pressing out). Otherwise, we have nothing to express. For a more radical perspective on this, see Manzotti’s (2016) theory of consciousness as existing in the world’s objects, and not just in individual minds (the mind-object identity theory, or “spread mind”).
Actually, Dewey (1934) would say that expression begins with an “impulsion” of the individual (and not an “impression”), a goal or action that receives a response from the world--the response being the impression mentioned above. I prefer to avoid this chicken-versus-egg argument and use “co-mingling” because I believe that it is not only we who have agency to affect the world, but the objects of the world as well. This perspective is useful because it captures the situations when expression is imposed upon us, or is inspired by unexpected observations. The point is that expression doesn’t spring from nowhere, out of nothing, and not just from individuals. It is a lot of work, and collaborative work at that.
Due to the work involved, none of this talk of attribution to the unconscious, collective unconscious, muses, genii, spread-minds, or object-agents, which applies equally to all creative acts, should disempower writers. On the contrary, it is better to take responsibility and know that we can use our minds (spread or not), experiences, and the media of expression to create new experiences that would not exist without our own hard work--experiences that can then profit not only others, but newly enjoyed as aesthetic by ourselves.
The material and tools of written expression
The raw material of written expression is of course language, and what a material it is! Language is sometimes considered the substance of thought itself, even though this is a bias that reflects its predominance in social environments. We swim in our language, and almost forget that it is a medium, just like the fish does not see the water. But language also restricts our expression to live within what words can do. Words inform our thoughts as much as they communication them. Research shows that conceptions of the world can be bound in the language we use. But these restrictions are more like safety ropes and scaffolding, offering infinitely more support than restriction.
Images, sounds, and physical gestures also represent thoughts, sometimes with more fluency. Buildings are thoughts rising into the sky, using a language of visual impression, space and time and physical relationships. Films are thoughts that flow in a montage of suggestive images. Sculptured gardens are thoughts that grow and age in pre-visioned fashion. Thought is manifest in all the materials we manipulate. But none offer the same malleability and precision of words to represent the flow of rational and poetic thought--its development, its connections, its missteps, its contradictions, its digressions, its emotional underpinnings. This opinion is highly arguable, and I suspect painters and filmmakers would be the first to challenge it.
Language is the raw material, but written expression offers myriad tools to work the material, some obvious, and some less obvious. Among the obvious: word choice, paragraph and sentence structure, grammar, tone (all of which offer levels of formality and impacts on meaning). Among the less obvious: treatment of time and sequence, such as pacing; use of signs like metaphors, similes, and symbols; choice of voice (authoritative, questioning, cautious, reserved, angry, objective, etc.); degree of sensuality versus abstraction. The list could go on and on.
Our goal in cultivating aesthetic experiences in any of their forms in our lives is to create meaning. Ultimately, aesthetic qualities are not about the surface of things, but the potential for meaning behind the surface, reflected there but born out in our experience. Written expression, and all expression in fact, also has at least three levels of meaning, corresponding roughly to why, how, and what. These are gesture, word, and text. How much we are aware of and address these levels of meaning determines the final impact of what we write.
Admittedly, writing can also be tedious and painful. Unlike most other activities with aesthetic potential, which are largely voluntary, almost all of us are at times forced to write. The pain can come about because what we are writing holds no interest to us, we don’t feel comfortable with our level of writing skill (particularly in a non-native language), or that we don't foresee a value in the result, no matter how skillfully we perform the task. Yet many people find it highly rewarding to tackle almost any writing project because they have discovered its aesthetic potential. Like swimming, which is a lot of work and even frightening to some, writing is avoided as a painful chore by many people. Yet a devout swimmer seeks to increase the challenge by swimming farther and faster, just as a devout writer might feel compelled to tackle a writing task on a topic that is relatively unknown (such as the case of many journalists), requires a lengthy treatment, or takes a unique point of view for the writer.
When it becomes aesthetic, the act of writing can seem to be guided by unconscious or exterior forces, like the collective unconscious, muses, or a private genius, because it is no longer just a goal-driven process, but also one of imagination and surrender to unexpected connections. We may not even recognize the source of our words or ideas, coming from forgotten conversations and readings, or from truly creative places. They might come to us in waves of coherent phrases or growing swells of ideas that seem to break and crash on the page in front of us out of our control. Writing can feel a little like swimming in an unpredictable surf.
At other times, it is only us. We know we are the only agent at work, and writing might draw from the deepest resources we own to meet the challenge. Writing can at times be like solving an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, an arduous but absorbing task of finding the right pieces and fitting them in just the right arrangement to create the effect we are after, or creating new pieces, carving them out of raw materials to custom fit. When we complete the puzzle, the sight can make us ebullient, either as we imagined it and struggled to get to, or something much more than we imagined. But we own it as something that only we could have achieved.
Alternatively, writing might feel like squeezing blood from a stone--each word and sentence a futile effort. We face the task with little hope or expectation for reward, and we surrender, resorting to perfunctory statements just to have something written.
When it is working, though, writing can create an all-absorbing flow, or undertow, not unlike more physical activities in which we lose attention of our surroundings, and we focus only on the growing words and sentences in front of us, considering how to fit them together to further our argument, explanation, description, or story. Writing calls for a variety of fortitudes. Words can be rational, but also emotional, sensual, and even ecstatic--useful for the full range of experience. And we can’t forget that words themselves represent sounds, and are not just characters on a page. They create music in the mind. For some, writing can be as expressive as singing.
Aesthetic outcomes can be achieved in any form of writing and are not reserved only for poets and novelists. However, much of what we write is rote, made up of boilerplate language we have repeated or heard others repeat many times, filled with clichés meaning little to anyone, and just adequate to fulfill the task. Some everyday writing tasks may simply be a gesture, like a thank you note, or a record, documenting a few facts, paying respects, or making an opinion known, and not an attempt at deeper expression. But everyday life offers many reasons to immerse ourselves in the act of writing to create something of richer value with bigger potential repercussions.
Written expression shares a quality that is common to other aesthetic experiences that end with a tangible outcome (e.g., gardening, collecting, taking photos, cooking, etc.)--the product itself is animate and has aesthetic potential for others, making it closer to the world of Art. Since literature is one of the seminal artforms, this is not surprising. Reading a well written work can bring not just new understanding, but deep emotional resonance, and also wonder and enjoyment of the language and text that gets readers there. When we express ourselves in words (or in any other medium for that matter), we create a world of meaning that assumes a life of its own arising from the words themselves, even if we see ourselves as the source. In fact, once we hit “send,” “publish,” or sign off on publication, we have decided to share ownership of those words and the eventual reader becomes owner of a new, proprietary interpretation. This “life of its own” quality is another reason that writing is often seen as collaborating with supernatural entities.
Expression as transaction
Despite common notions, expression is not simply a process of spilling out our thoughts and emotions (or those of guiding spirits) with little care for the reader. Expression is a collaboration, or transaction, with both our readers and the world we experience.
Firstly, expression is always committed toward an audience that demands our consideration, not just for oneself, so it is from the start a sort of transaction. The model reader theory of Umberto Eco suggests that a text is necessarily full of open spaces that the reader must fill in, and the author needs to consider how a typical reader will do this. Not just any reader, but one toward whom the text is directed. Every text “demands cooperation.”
Secondly, in a very real sense, expression does not begin inside us, but in our experience--in the transactions we have with the world. It begins in the world within which we are just one actor (see Dewey, 1925), albeit a critical one. Any expression is first a process of co-mingling with the world (we might call this impression, or, literally, pressing in), and only after this can the work of expression begin (literally, pressing out). Otherwise, we have nothing to express. For a more radical perspective on this, see Manzotti’s (2016) theory of consciousness as existing in the world’s objects, and not just in individual minds (the mind-object identity theory, or “spread mind”).
Actually, Dewey (1934) would say that expression begins with an “impulsion” of the individual (and not an “impression”), a goal or action that receives a response from the world--the response being the impression mentioned above. I prefer to avoid this chicken-versus-egg argument and use “co-mingling” because I believe that it is not only we who have agency to affect the world, but the objects of the world as well. This perspective is useful because it captures the situations when expression is imposed upon us, or is inspired by unexpected observations. The point is that expression doesn’t spring from nowhere, out of nothing, and not just from individuals. It is a lot of work, and collaborative work at that.
Due to the work involved, none of this talk of attribution to the unconscious, collective unconscious, muses, genii, spread-minds, or object-agents, which applies equally to all creative acts, should disempower writers. On the contrary, it is better to take responsibility and know that we can use our minds (spread or not), experiences, and the media of expression to create new experiences that would not exist without our own hard work--experiences that can then profit not only others, but newly enjoyed as aesthetic by ourselves.
The material and tools of written expression
The raw material of written expression is of course language, and what a material it is! Language is sometimes considered the substance of thought itself, even though this is a bias that reflects its predominance in social environments. We swim in our language, and almost forget that it is a medium, just like the fish does not see the water. But language also restricts our expression to live within what words can do. Words inform our thoughts as much as they communication them. Research shows that conceptions of the world can be bound in the language we use. But these restrictions are more like safety ropes and scaffolding, offering infinitely more support than restriction.
Images, sounds, and physical gestures also represent thoughts, sometimes with more fluency. Buildings are thoughts rising into the sky, using a language of visual impression, space and time and physical relationships. Films are thoughts that flow in a montage of suggestive images. Sculptured gardens are thoughts that grow and age in pre-visioned fashion. Thought is manifest in all the materials we manipulate. But none offer the same malleability and precision of words to represent the flow of rational and poetic thought--its development, its connections, its missteps, its contradictions, its digressions, its emotional underpinnings. This opinion is highly arguable, and I suspect painters and filmmakers would be the first to challenge it.
Language is the raw material, but written expression offers myriad tools to work the material, some obvious, and some less obvious. Among the obvious: word choice, paragraph and sentence structure, grammar, tone (all of which offer levels of formality and impacts on meaning). Among the less obvious: treatment of time and sequence, such as pacing; use of signs like metaphors, similes, and symbols; choice of voice (authoritative, questioning, cautious, reserved, angry, objective, etc.); degree of sensuality versus abstraction. The list could go on and on.
Our goal in cultivating aesthetic experiences in any of their forms in our lives is to create meaning. Ultimately, aesthetic qualities are not about the surface of things, but the potential for meaning behind the surface, reflected there but born out in our experience. Written expression, and all expression in fact, also has at least three levels of meaning, corresponding roughly to why, how, and what. These are gesture, word, and text. How much we are aware of and address these levels of meaning determines the final impact of what we write.
- Why we write is the gesture level of meaning. We may write to persuade, to honor, to clarify, to explain, to teach, to assert, to confront, to irritate, to console, to placate, to impress, to show appreciation, etc. The gesture might not always be explicit, or might even be hidden. But the writer, at least, should be aware.
- The word is the next level of meaning, the exegesis, the meaning emanating from the choice and structure of the words, taking into account the use of all the tools of expression. Because meaning is never purely literal, the word is not exactly what the translator translates, but what the translator must understand about the the intended meaning of words in order to translate the text accurately.
- The text is the meaning behind the work as a publication, its relationship to other texts, and its actual impact upon publication and over time. “Publication” does not imply only books and articles. Web pages and blog posts and emails are also publications with a multiple levels of meaning. And they can go viral, have more cultural impact, even more than a best-selling book. The textual level of meaning is not fully under the influence of the author, but also previous and contemporary authors, publishers, and the audience.
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