horace, ars poetica — notes
statement: horace elevates the criterion of unity partly to discipline rhetorical display rather than to raise artistic integrity, sublimity or excellence. his context is oversaturated with ornamental virtuosity and undertheorized when it comes to structural composition nor social circles relative allowances, making his writing polemically primitive. you don't need to turn objects of technical craftsmanship into contemporary art's eventification of artistic processes, you could just gesture at exactly how the authority in your practices comes from your own relative preferences rather than presenting a rigid and tight understanding of compoisition and overdefining of genre limits in artistic presentation.
1-33 ontological wholeness framed as rigidity in narrative, structure and pacing is an aesthetic argument proved to be pointless when it faces a real work, where, its iconography, symbolic status and level of tolerance shapes the outcome of perception more than its internal composition. tolerance is a backhanded excuse for worshipping the mundane pacing of a world that has to behave as if the more it can stand itself, the more it can stand up in general, which is not the same thing - self-inherited patient pedantism, when turned into a virtue, only glorifies the sublime as a type of disposable cheap thrill, it has more to do with untempered attitude than the appreciation of deeper fine things.
the worship of totality framed as the worship of simplified perfection is a failure of transgression as a disposable scarcity of attention rather than careful artistic decision making, where the inevitability of a planned work arises from all its wrong aspects. pedantry doesnt protect habit, and excessive coherence doesnt flatten intensity, rather, noise is the real medium of complexity, as when deleuze argues against the meter. the stacking of complex aspects builds unregulated towers that arent regulated by cutting but are regulated by even harsher flows of the same thing, outwards regulation protects the craft against its own excess rather than totalizing it into clarity. if our attention was physiologically more refined, you would once and for all be able to see with your own vision how wrong horace is, when all the iconic works of our time prove to be nothing more than our own shortcomings.
a "badly" constructed poem isn't just defended by genres. markets, communities or existing practices of poetry no matter the location or outcome, but itself even in purposelessness is never random nor meaningless. especially though, it is neither comparable to a grotesque painting, nor are grotesque paintings somehow aesthetically inferior simply because they are unevenly juxtaposed and chaotically set. unlike contemporary art movements though, the grotesque is neither its own self-justifiable category nor simply an artistic metaphor that depends on conceptual and narrative cohesion beyond its own technical value as an artistic object. more than that, grotesque objects, even when accidental on the side of the artist, have natural artistic value, posteriori discoverable artistic value, and contain just as many valuable elements as harmonious objects, if not even more than that.
radical unevenness is not for critics to judge as ulterior, they can judge it to exercise their sorting mechanisms or cultural biases, but uneveness does not probabilistically obfuscate more often than it completes. confused works are self-completed, they don't appear confusing, value judgement and artistic observation is uneven in its patience, it is epistemologically noisy and unreliable, all artistic accidents are self-intentional in their very becoming, whereas all evaluative standards are accidental at the core of their social feedback procession. grotesqueness cannot possibly be a critical precedent, art has no critical precedents beyond distinctions, not even ones that are defined as crafts interior to limits transposed by communities. artistic value itself is neither fully discoverable in the object, nor in the community that judges it, nor in the interplay between these two facets, but rather depends on two totally distinct criteria, future alien discovery (metaphorically and literally alien) and the intrinsic complexity of the intention by the artist, which in conditional art is fully unattainable by the context of the setting, and in craftsmanship-related art does depend on the technical structure and elements of thew object, but not as a type of talent, virtue, knowledge or iterative training, but simply as a choice.
this doesnt mean that all craftsmanship forms are equally valuable, but it does mean that all craftsmanship forms are easily learnable, transferable and contextualizable at least when it comes to cognitive mimicry and speed of transfer. repetition, consistency and fast learning show how arbitrary this is, yet in usual contexts of craftsmanship-related technical learning, through concepts like genius and talent, learning is treated like its own latent virtue, when it is nothing more than a social learning mechanism that depends on the context of its historical situatedness rather than individual skill or a supposed stage of learning, which is just the industrialization of natural and easily attainable drives. all difficulty in technical process is superficially and artificially constructed by small variations in social movement rather than in artistic complexity.
14-23 the work never aims to be one thing except if it aims to impress patrons, the artist never impresses himself, he finds out in real time that a higher force of the world possess him to be unable to execute a certain command at a certain moment. the fantasy of finished and well-deserved products is obsolete, it is way easier to draw a shipwreck that ends up being a well-depicted version of itself, or supposedly of what was promised, even if crafts never promise anything beyond the ability for a social relation, whereas, to draw a shipwreck that turns into beautiful scenery is a metabolic depiction of the real world state of the artist, which matters way more in the exchange of artistic relation, that, if you wanted to see a shipwreck, you would go and crash a ship yourself, or wait for one to boil up at the shore. if you didnt want to wait for it you would get a painting committed, to discover some deeper profundity, but then you shouldnt be surprised if to some of us a shipwreck isnt actually one just because it presents itself to be in the real world.
the jar turning into a pitcher, the desperate swimmer into a cyprus tree, not only is horace more concerned about the pragmatic realism of being paid or avoiding embarassement than of artistic integrity in real time, but he also doesnt possibly understand how its more important that when a mediocre jar turns into an above average pitcher, the jar and the pitcher are simply metaphors for the experience of time as related to us, rather than the experience of objects as related to time. horace is worried about pitchers and jars on their own, without actually caring about the divinity of objects the way a modern graham harman would. he is neither concerned about objects nor about social relations or our careful embedding of their significance in real time, he is simply a jar-producing factory worried that he may lose his mind or his job if he makes the wrong turn
24-31 horace aims to achieve sublimity and brevity by collapsing creative imagination if it distracts from the wholeness of imagery and the natural beauty contained in the unity between things as they are, and presentations as they promise to be. and he is right, the contemporary world is obssessed with transposition as if it equals wit when reality transgression in fact when approved of as a social mechanism becomes nothing more than a complex social translation of the exact same obscenity already present in the natural state of the world and its depictions, the common effect that ends up as a product of mimesis presents in the same way that a dolphin in a sea and a boar in the forest already present, where they evoke nothing but the profanity of the way of things are, as they happened to have turned out or already to be.
horace is concerned about the social development of art clouding or showing the artist as incapable of facing the truth of things in their own excellent or harmonious presentation as finished products, as a temperament that allows itself to present concreticity and seriousness in its portrayal. this concern is misplaced, because not only is his metaphor fundamentally irrelevant to the perception of the artist when considering the fact that seriousness is a constantly moving social goalpost rather than integrated into the manner of things as they are, but on top of that his understanding of the constitutions strips them to their own elemental essence. when he speaks of wholeness, his imagination that a dolphin in a forest is impossible speaks of his inability to imagine it as anything other than a parody, which in and of itself shows his poorly rigid comprehension of artistic portrayal in composition.
32-37 the incompetent craftsman who is unable to represent a whole figure in the form of a sculpture is not struggling a technical deficit or lack of talent, he's suffering a mental blockade that disallows the social aura of a whole sculpture to make sense within his field. say the entire sculptural guild around him built precisely disfigured statues with detailed toenails, or the other way around, perfectly oblique statues with no detail, his first goal would be to create a complex yet stable figure. or otherwise, if the greek council-states went around disfiguring everyone systematically, he would get an innumerable amount of inspiration to create a harmonious and total figure. or otherwise, the complexity in the toenails shows a lack of restraint when motivation finally allows technical patience, but the lack of figured detail shows not an inability to craft, but a lack of tolerance when it comes to crafting something banal. to horace, the technical object's stated value is so important that he never considers the value of refusing to craft a stable figure form
38-45 yet another sign of pedantism, horace values the collapse of excellence in favor of the presentation of moderation. this de-accelerating feature is located within the latent influence of sage philosophy, a backhanded attempt at controlling that which is not possible to enumerate. almost eastern-presenting in character, but sold off to the western world through protestantism, consistency is not the result of refusal, ordering or proper navigation. it is simply the ability to constantly increase your own saturation whilst still maintaing a proper load, so that when this load surfaces, the values it holds within it both override and perfectly sit inside of the routine goal.
46-59/60-72 this paragraph is less self-flagellating than usual, allowing the coinage of new terms, be it modestly! who is horace, to decide for other conceptual thinkers how many terms they're allowed to coin? the importance structurally for new vocabulary is to keep repeating it not only within your own work but to promote it outwards as a social virus, to present it as appealing and relevant to certain philosophies, not as a marketing tactic but as a genuine application of vocabulary. words themeslves in their common-sense language form are entirely dumbed down for an audience incapable nor interested in dealing with language as an artform. horace is afraid about sustainability, repeatability and advancement in terminology, when instead he should be more interested in how to connect all thinkers so that intellectual communities have constant openable guidelines to cross-expand eachothers terminological advancements, and to repeat the ritual of using eachothers terminology. this wont be done through academic codexes, but through constant iterative expansion and expression, something that doesnt require modesty but tight circulation loops and a genuine care to scale upon others works besides the limits of status or local entropy. horace is wrong about permanence as well as expected. he is not the one with the ability to declare shifting stakes, these happen dialectically and depend on various historical baggage.
horace shouldn't be teaching poets to lean away from embracing permanence, but to make it an almost functionally analytical tasks for philosophers to be walking units of glossarial vocabulary. philosophers themselves underaccentuate their craft by failing to keep codexes and mnemotechnological memories of retention with them, nor do they regularly keep the required terms near them unless they're actively writing a script. impermanence may be a result of relevance and impact, but it cant be a result of influence or external shifting stakes, which should never possibly alter language structures within actually decisive communities. the external not entirely serious intellectual world can borrow linguistic scripts from dead languages or explore those domains, but the proper intellectual circle has the responsibility of consistently improving upon its own iterations whilst retaining their limits (not equally nor rigidly, but decisively) rather than foregoing development in favor of self-consistency. this is not an imposition, but a natural effect of taking crafts seriously over time. cosmological views of time dont bode well with human time. this isnt about academia storing past instances of thought, transgressive ideas within themselves contain storage-functions, the intellectual never has to trade substantive development for the treasuries of tradition
why am i creating all this fuss about saturation and intensity over pre-proportionalizing and pre-defining set limits that underexpand their ability? this isnt an aesthetic preference by me, the idea is that selective criteria benefit an economy of scarcity and stupidity that is unable to intake more expressive works. generative overflow should be a natural condition of artistic legibility, prior proportion is a stylistical tool maintained by overly rigid personalities who basically quantify it as a social good. in one single artwork or policy this does little farm other than organize the world in a clear and stratified manner, but over a long period of time this causes a rare event, a hypergeneralization of present forms and ultimately even the stieglerian grammatization of artistic endeavours as a totality. the horaetian cycle is one where excess generates form -> form invites replication -> replication invites resistance. this resistance goes from being a simple viewing devices, something that helps others orient navigationally around excess, to being a classifying regime as seen in aristotles poetics - that delimits and quantifies endeavours into practices not only that order industrialization, but the psyche of the artistic creator, who is no longer allowed to experiment with form but only with substance.