“Great art, the prevailing theory on the subject goes, forces the artists who follow it to think differently.” Oh yeah? Free DE coffee mug to anyone who can identify the “theory” prevailing here. (I know, I know. But sometimes those fish are so annoying!)
A few weeks ago, Ange asked:
Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own difficulty as well as its pleasures (prosodic, sensual, scenic) to maximize its potential as a unique cultural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?
Today I came across a week-old article in the Boston Globe that suggests one way to start answering the question. Drake Bennett reports on research in cognitive fluency, “a measure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the scientific formalization of common sense, and the primary result of the studies can hardly count as novel or surprising: our brains like to take the easy route whenever possible. “Fluency is an adaptive shortcut,” Bennett writes. “According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.”
More interesting is the way disfluency can be put to productive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artistic and philosophical difficulty:
From today’s Times:
Some experts say that emissions from airline travel are simply so large that it may be impossible to offset them.
“Buying offsets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice idea, but that doesn’t end world hunger,” said Anja Kollmuss, a staff scientist for the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based at a branch at Tufts University.
“Buying offsets won’t solve the problem because flying around the way we do is simply unsustainable,” said Ms. Kollmuss, who has researched airline offsets.
A recent study in Britain concluded that one flight from London to Los Angeles produced more carbon dioxide per person than the average British commuter produces in a year by traveling by train, subway or car.
Also, from The Awl:
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