Ive always loved that line Truman Capote had about Jack Kerouacs "on the road". "That's not writing, that's typing!" Its an astoundingly witty and interesting line. It problematizes and simultaneously answers the question it poses. It is a vexing question none the less, one which is confronted by much art of the 20th century. What is art? What is writing? What is photography? What is painting? The answer seems to be that writing, and indeed all art, is not simply in the behavior or creating of the art itself. There is a subtle connotation touched on by this line. That which is behind the "act" of typing is writing. Not all typing is writing but all writing is typing. It is not simply the event itself but the connotation of the event which is important. It is the connotation of typing which is writing, which is art. Ive always loved this quote also because it draws a specific boundary between two otherwise seemingly identical things. It quite eloquently teases out the meaning of both terms and yet in no ham-fisted way does it define them explicitly.
Always it seems to me people (sometimes myself included) misunderstand this relationship. The relationship between ideology and behavior. Ideology, in this case, is writing, the behavior is typing. Often we confuse the situation, not even realizing the ideology exists and mistaking the behavior as the totality of the subject. As if all typing was writing. There is no explicit definition of "writing" because writing, like all art and all culture, is about the connotations brought about by ideology. We cannot quantify "art". We cannot apply a scientific method to art. Art is beyond the boundary of "quantity". And in as much as we cannot apply science to art we cannot apply art to science. We cannot predict the outcome or the structure of an experiment via "aesthetics". Two plus two is never five, even when you feel like its the right answer. Moreover this inability to quantify art dovetails very nicely with the separation between ideology and behavior. We might quantify the behavior of an "art" but never its ideology. So say for instance we say photographs have to have such and such a ratio of light to dark space. Or a painting with these specific color values will be pleasing to the eye because the majority of "great" paintings have these color relationships. It is all well and good to analyze art at this level but it would be analyzing the typing not the writing. Judge art on this level, believe that this quantity is the totality of the art and it will forever remain "typing". No, to truly become invested in the art, to become lovers of art, to participate in the ideological exchange, we must divest ourselves of these analytic notions of structural analysis, of quantities. Teaching someone grammar is not teaching them to write. Sticking a brush and palette before them does not make them a painter. Or in the words of Chuck Palaniuk "sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken"
