Concepts are the way the brain handles bits of information, how it reduces complex experiences to simpler parts that exist independently of their instances. Just now⁰ next¹ to my computer² is³ an empty⁴ coffee⁵ cup⁶ with⁷ a spoon⁸ in⁹ it. Notice the numbered words, and see how they correspond to categories of objects, as well as relationships of time and space, and notice how they are universal. The coffee in my pantry is independent of the coffee cup, but both are still coffee.
Concepts are the building blocks of understanding reality and the human existence. So far so obvious.
Here’s the non-obvious bit: concepts are (at present, perhaps in principle) incommunicable. They exist as unique patterns of neurological activity, firmly cordoned off from the rest of reality by a good few millimeters of cranial bone.
In order to communicate a concept, you need a medium. A medium is a thing which can be manipulated by human means, and understood by human senses. Speech, writing, sculpture, painting, gesture, dance, cooking. Manipulation and arrangement of any object to achieve a sensory response.
Pointing at a rock is communicating the concept that the rock is deserving of attention though a gesture.
War And Peace is communicating… Well, a whole lot, I’d imagine — never actually read it — through written words.
Which brings me neatly to another thing: conceps on their own are timeless. But stringing concepts together through any kind of dependence (causal, procedural, temporal) creates a Narrative. Above, I numbered the words in a sentence to showcase how each word is a fragment of meaning. Notice now how the words come together by a dependence relation (now, next to, in, temporal closeness, spatial closeness) to form a narrative of a particular situation which is complex.
Narratives can be as simple as the number line (two comes after one, three comes after two,) or as complex as Hamilton the Broadway Musical (How a bastard orphan goes from squalor to stellar.)
But the purest narrative is in fact the daydream, the thought train, the unspoken plan. It exists solely in your mind, composed of pure concept.
Because as soon as you factor in a medium, you get a new thing for free: aesthetics. Hearing a person speak, you are beholden to their speech patterns and ideosyncracies, and to their humor — jokes and especially wordplay are a feature of the way speech and writing is percieved. Take Douglas Adams who described drinking a fictitious drink as “having your brain bashed out with a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large gold brick.” The defiance of the order of dependency in the meaning derives humor.
Notice even the very structuring of my paragraphs, or my frankly speaking verbose word choice in this very essay. There’s a certain feel to it, is there not?
That’s what makes a story: a narrative, expressed through a medium. The most narrative-like stories gives us technical reports and (Tristram Shandy-style) realism. The most important part of a technical report is the content, and in conveying the intended concepts and their relations, being as unambiguous as possible. The realism movement sought to convey the enormous causal tapestry that surrounds the traditional story, endlessly going off causal tangents.
The least narrative-like story… Is mathematical formulae, abstract art, ambient music, and poetry. A mathematical formulae relays a single concept (the understanding of which often depends on other concepts, but not in a way more complex than the way my coffee cup is made of porcelain.)
Abstract art is often a play on visual imagery evoking emotion and provoking interpretation, with no clear motive, purpose or intention other than just that. Poetry is the distillation of wordplay to its logical conclusion. Ambient music exists solely to induce auditory experiences that do not detract from other activities.
Sculpture can tell the story of how Heracles defeated the Lion, or it can be huge and spiky and ominous and make you wonder about the industrialization of the modern age.
Or, you know, a thing can fall in the middle of those extremes.
And that is what Art is, if you ask me: playing in the friction between the concept and the medium, exploring narrative and aesthetics. Stories and poetry in the broadest sense: from film to cave painting and campfire stories.
