Abstract: For the first edition of IEDAs, this essay tracks back almost 100 years to the Cannibalist Manifesto of Oswald de Andrade, published in the first edition of the 1928 ‘Revista de Antropofagia’. Through an external engagement with the Antropofagial critique, the question becomes one of the understanding and relevance of polymathy under conditions of ontological plurality. The central exposition is that the construction of the ‘polymath’ requires an ontological unity belonging among the mechanisms solidifying centre-periphery onto-evaluations. The exposition is decomposed into two observations. First, the rather trivial observation that the categories of mastery that enable the possibility of polymaths are dependent on the existence of an ontological unity. Second, the more interesting exploration of the ways in which the wider base of cultural knowledge and skills that are often demanded from representative origins in the periphery to achieve relevance sketch an unnamed polymathy. Despite the indication, the evaluation remains overturned to the glorification of the central ‘specialist’ and the unacknowledged peripheral ‘dilettante’.
Keywords: Ontological pluralism; Cultural Anthropophagy
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The title of this short essay comes from a translation of Jean de Léry’s 1578 Histoire d’un voyage (History of a journey)1. In it he describes participating in a musical ritual ceremony with Tupinambá. While praising their harmony, he writes parenthetically that the Tupinambá do not know what music is:
“..such was their melody that although they do not know what music is—those who have not heard them would never believe that they could make such harmony. … I stood there transported with delight. Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears2.”
De Léry’s description, vividly embodied, affirms a sonorous experience while categorically denying that it is ‘music’. Here, ‘music’ is not a linguistic distinction analogous to stating precisely that the 3/4 cadence is definitional for a Waltz. Rather, it is a conception that assigns the category and evaluation of ‘music’ to a range of forms, known to include forms that do not yet exist, but that come into being through a specific historically contingent tradition. ‘Music’, being the accomplishment of particular (culturally inscribed) genius, cannot be found among cannibals — no matter the quality or intensity of experience that their aural cultural productions invoke.
It is not the experience of the music that is definitional, but rather the categorical relations within the tradition. Here, ‘categorical relations’ is used to refer to the web of instances that have been entered into the tradition as something (e.g., music), the people that have been entered as someone (e.g. musicians), the esteem or allure attached to these activities and people, the experiences and stories received and transmitted, the technology and mediators and multiple forms of participation or exclusion. One example of participation or exclusion is pulling out ‘folk music’ from ‘music’. These categorical relations are sedimented and elaborated within a specific tradition, possessing specific performance and practical virtues3 and are co-identical with it. This means that the tradition does not exist apart from its historically instanced categorical relations and that any extant object in those relations is itself not ever-singular, but a relational entity. What is essential is that these relations are ‘tight and tangled’, meaning that, in addition to the inability to qualify on experiential grounds, even the demonstration of compatible constituents, like harmony or rhythm in the case of the Tupinambá, cannot confer designation. Furthermore, the tangle of relations means that innovation is possible because any or all of the substantive elements of the tradition can be expunged, while the work can remain by its values and relations proximal to the tradition4.
3. To be compared with the practice of ‘epistemic virtues’ in a profession as described in Daston and Galison (2007)
4. Much of ‘modern’ creation proceeds on this basis, with one particularly famous example being John Cages’s 1952 experimental composition 4’33’’ which was ‘composed’ of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
Such a web can be imagined for any shared ontology; however, it is an important mechanism in centre-periphery dynamics. Under this characterisation, the ‘centre’ can be described as a locus of ontological-axiological transformation. This transformation between the ontological and axiological entities in the web of categorical relations implies that the definition of what is, and what is to be valued, are codified and reinforced in such a way that only the expressions which emerge from within the dominant frame can be considered ‘good’ and those ‘good’ things which can be found outside of the dominant tradition must be something else. A similar point has been made by Spitzer, as quoted by Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha (2000)5 when he writes: “the implied assertion that a Spanish work of art is great because it is genuinely Spanish and it is genuinely Spanish when it is great”. Concretely, De Léry’s ‘delightful’ experience must truly be an experience of a non-musical kind, even if constituent concepts (harmony, rhythm) remain relevant.
5. See ‘Introduction’ pg xx
Furthermore, it should be remembered that such characterisations of centre-periphery are cross-scale and can be international, intercultural, intergenerational, gendered, or access based (such as artists having institutional support or lacking it). Thus, categorical relations and evaluations form a totalising tangle that constitute a tradition while enabling innovation within that tradition. In doing so, the relations support and reproduce centre-periphery dynamics unless ontological plurality is taken seriously.
However, the dominant descriptions have been of ontological unity — both at the level of entity and categorical relation web. The consequence is that anything external to the web either does not exist, or is something else, as in the case of Tupinambá music. This phenomenon is by no means distinctive in arts or music, but pervades most spheres of collective reasoning and the establishment and contestation of ontological entities, and this of course, includes a concept such as a ‘polymath’.
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Ontological Transvalorisation
“What is important to reiterate is the fact that its Brazilian references unsettle and subvert European organisations of reality: at its core the ‘Manifesto’ insists on a defamiliarised ontology6.” (Refskou et al, 2019) 350 years after Histoire d’un voyage, and nearly one 100 years prior to the present inaugural edition of IEDAs, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) published his ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ to the Revista de Antropofagia (Andrade 1928). Described by Madureira (2004) as an ‘early skirmish of the now familiar war on totality’ (pg 115), the text became a pillar of Brazilian Modernism (Barry 1991). One primary line of attack in the Cannibalist Manifesto is an attempt to exit the universal ontology that continued to characterise the so-called ‘derivative’ or ‘native’ possibilities for artistic and philosophic expression outside of the valorised centres. By assuming the position of the radical ‘other’, Anthropophagic approaches rip apart the web of central categorical relations and pull out the parts and pieces for entry into a different relational form.
6. ‘Introduction’ by Anne Sophie Refskou, Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho and Marcel Alvaro de Amorim pg 6
In fact, the relational dynamics of the centre have already deposited their objects into peripheral webs, but in such a way that their presence refers back to the central web and their participation invalidates and devalues the peripheral tradition in which they were planted. The main Anthropophagic action then, is not inclusion, but in the phrase of Wolff’s Campos (2010) ‘transvaluation’. Transvaluation permutes the presence of central objects in peripheral traditions from lures to an unattainable exteriority, into an irreverent expropriation and realignment. Given the fecundity and entrenchment of this conception of Cultural Cannibalism in the Brazilian context, there is a full conversations surrounding it — including of course substantial critiques and doubts, for example King’s concern that:
“Although it defamiliarises practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviours to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.” (King, 2000)7
7. See pg 108
Without taking a firm stance on the debate — which would anyway be a strange thing for a person dependent on translated selections to do — I am rather concerned with the possibility of ontological plurality and not explicitly on the binary form of a periphery and a centre which I diagnose as a consequence of the framing of ontological unity. When ontological plurality is the basis, then it is not straightforward to say that Tupinambá do not know what music is, but it is straightforward to say that music is also what the Tupinambá are doing.
The problem of ontological plurality, and the fear of relativism, are among the drivers of tired conversations about ‘what actually is art’. While it is often expected that our ‘contemporary, globally connected and locally inclusive, arts and culture scene’ has resigned these questions to irrelevance, an interview with Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa responding to critique of his curation of the main exhibit of the 2024 Venice Biennale demonstrates the continued need to elaborate thinking in this direction:
“An interesting subject that came up quite a lot was a certain critique towards what some reviewers and writers hold as ‘folkloric.’ That was really quite curious to see,” Pedrosa responded. “Even the term artista popular, which means folk artist, is not a term we use [in Brazil] anymore; it’s a patronising term for artists working outside the traditional aesthetic of European art.” (as reported in Angeleti, 2024)
Returning to Barry’s Andrade, the Manifesto retains an erudite eclecticism that displays a mastery of the knowledge of both poetic and scholastic forms which transmits even in translation. Barry’s Andrade deploys references to the cannons of the European tradition and confronts them with both the European image of the colonised culture and its ‘authentic inauthentic’ (Refskou et al, 2019) animation in the experiences of a particular cultural milieu. As one of many possible examples he writes:
“It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what urban, suburban, frontier and continental were. Lazy in the mapamundi of Brazil. A participatory consciousness, a religious rhythmics.” (Andrade and Bary, 1991)8
8. See pg 39
Within this short stanza, Bary, following the annotated French translation of Benedito Nunes, identifies references to the German writer Goethe, the French philosopher Rousseau, and French philosopher and ethnographer Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. From this condensed form can also be read a confrontation with an established ontological organisation of the world. This world is built in popular language and categorical taxonomies, both scientific and colloquial.
Simultaneously this contest activates a play of valuations, which are explicit in Anzini and Alcobia-Murphy’s translation of Andrade’s ‘The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy’. In it he links axiology to ontology, while simultaneously name-dropping Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Freud, Descartes and others. The works behind the names are tagged rather than analysed, turned into symbols of ideas that are made to stand in for a collection of associations that can be invoked and revoked at will. In this way, Anzini and Alcobia-Murphy’s Andrade changes what Descartes is in the web. He is transformed from a person who produced influential writings in 17th century Europe to an enactor of dualism aligned to epistemologies and axiologies which consolidate into a patriarchy that can be dialectically opposed to a Brazilian matriarchy in order to produce techno- synthetic futures. For my purpose, it is not the plausibility of Anzini and Alcobia-Murphy’s Andrade’s argument but the transformations that occur and what must be known in order to perform them.
To be a polymath is to be the master of diverse bases of knowledge, usually taken to need at least one technical or mathematical and one creative field, that are recognised as essentially different but within a tradition. So an architect of bridges who must deal with precise load bearing calculations and aesthetic representations is not a polymath. At least one reason for this is that the work of an architect is small ‘o’ original, but consists of deviations within established categories. To be a polymath one must conjure an aura of exceptional ability and essential originality that displays the capacity to innovate within fields that are rarely combined. Given this, it would seem to imply that a polymath is an agent of disruption, perhaps even capable of stimulating thinking in the direction of ontological plurality.
However, this would only be possible if the knowledge domains were not, as I have claimed, categorical relations. As the example of artistic innovation described above, all forms of the field can be reformed or expunged as long as the ontological unity is preserved through belonging to the tradition and adhering to its systematic differencing. It is for this reason, that it is trivial to assert that the polymath as I have described it requires an ontological unity — without it there are not such fixed fields to master, but rather something of a generalisation of capabilities. In science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love (1973) the cross-field capacities of the generalist, even in ‘high’ cultural forms such as the sonnet are stripped of all aura of exception. In fact, the construction chosen by Heinlein asserts these capabilities as a human minimum rather than a nearly divine optimum:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.” (Heinlein, 1973)9
9. See pg 248
The conversion of the exceptional to a minimum is what is often demanded of peripheral actors who are tasked with becoming masters of a multiplicity that goes unrecognised while the centre upholds its ontological unity. If one originates in a centre, one not only has life ways that ‘match’ the categorical relations, but also acquires ways of thinking and creating that have the potential to gain recognition.
If one enters from the periphery, it is not enough to master the relations that constitute one’s own experience and community criteria, but it is necessary to seek mastery also of the categorical relations of the centre. This demand is extended and amplified, even as one knows and is reminded that as an exteriority, mastery is not possible through production — either of experiences or by building from the same materials. Thus, despite Andrade’s obvious erudition and familiarity with diverse knowledge bases, he is not a ‘polymath’. It is easily conceivable that scholars in the fields he turns into symbols though the invocation of names would award little recognition or respond with derision.
The argument that centre-peripheral dynamics thrive on tautological evaluations is not new — on the contrary, the Cannibalist Manifesto of Oswald de Andrade is nearly 100 years old. However, if there is something interesting in these reflections it is the thought that the knowledge and skills required to become relevant if one starts on the periphery may constitute a kind of unnamed polymathy. This is because relevance requires the mastery of multiple systems of categorical relations in structures that parade ontological unity. Put simply enough, the polymath then is not the master of diverse fields within the unified web, but a master of multiple webs and perhaps in this, there is a potential for transformation.
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Sarah Hager
Doctoral Candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin Sarah Hager brings knowledge and perspectives from historical epistemology and artistic research into interdisciplinary collaborations between art and science. A graduate of Oxford University in the UK and Federico II in Italy, Hager is a doctoral candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin.
References:
Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antopofago.” Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo, Brasil), no.1 (May 1928): 3,7. Digitised version accessed on 11/13/2023 from International Center for the Arts of The Americas (ICAA) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/771303
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Angeleti, G. (2024, June 10). ‘Like saying that you need to wear European fashion to attend the Venice Biennale’: Adriano Pedrosa responds to criticisms of “Foreigners Everywhere.” The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/06/10/adriano-pedrosa-responds-criticisms-venice-biennale-exhibition
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