Clockwork Muse

Martindale thought he'd found the principal component of art, which was "primordial content" (PC) as a function of time. He believed that artistic change is internally driven by the quest for novelty ("arousal potential", AP). So an art moves regularly through different styles, and within each style, the fraction of primordial content goes down, then up. He did many quantitative, statistical tests in many different art forms, covering the past 700 years, to prove this. Unfortunately, he didn't understand statistics, and his analysis is plagued by a failure to account for multiple hypothesis testing, a crippling failure to account for degrees of freedom, confusion of statistical significance with significance, and post-hoc rationalization. So most of his conclusions are at best suggestive, and at worst bogus. But his experiments _could_ have been analyzed correctly. He showed us many creative ways to experiment quantitatively on art. He just didn't get the logic and math right. And he did several important experiments correctly, providing strong evidence for some interesting, contentious, and very broadly-applicable theories about art. But if you haven't got a strong background in math, you'll never be able to tell which of his experiments are the pearls among the rubbish.First, the good: Chapter 7, "Cross-National, Cross-Genre, and Cross-Media Synchrony", section 2 on cross-media styles: This experiment showed that the terms "baroque", "romantic", and "neoclassical" mean something other than just "what people did during a specific time period", something that holds across music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, by showing that naive subjects group works of art together with works of art in different media made during the same time period. There is a flub in the analysis, when he let subjects created an average of 9 groups (p. 253), then used math assuming they had created 3 groups (p. 254), but it doesn't invalidate his results. It reveals a worrying inconsistency--the accuracy he claims subjects had wouldn't be even theoretically possible if they'd made 9 groups. But the error, if there is any, is in the direction of making his results stronger than his analysis indicates. The musical data chosen is peculiar, excluding Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner from the romantic, but their inclusion would only have made his results stronger. Chapter 8, "Art and Society", the only chapter in which he adjusts for multiple hypothesis testing, presents some good data indicating that prosperity for the working class correlates with collective thought, cultural references, and a de-emphasis on nature; conservatism correlates with concrete words and references to culture, while liberalism correlates with thought, emotion, and action. (A note to the reader: Never use patent data as an indicator of the inventiveness of an era; it depends much more on the cost of patents and the courts' current interpretation of USC Title 35 than on the degree of innovation.) The work is interesting, but cast into doubt by the great inconsistency between the British and American data. In Chapter 9, "The Artist and the Work of Art", discussing the common theme of a hero's descent into an underworld, he pioneers the use of word frequency counts to disclose the theme of a story. "We can use coherence of trends [in word usage] to decipher what a narrative is about: that is, if a narrative is about overcoming evil, the trend in evaluative connotation should be stronger than the trend in primordial content. If a narrative is about alteration in consciousness, the reverse should be the case. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, shows a clear trend in primordial content but no trend at all in the use of good versus bad words: it must be about alteration in consciousness rather than good versus evil. This conclusions conforms with what a Tibetan Buddhist would probably tell you. The descent into Hell in book I of Homer's Odyssey is more about good and evil than about alteration in consciousness, though it seems to be about both. In this case, the trend indicates that Hell is a better place than earth, and is consistent with pagan conceptions of the afterlife. ... We find the reverse with Moby Dick, which doesn't have much to do with ethics but does seem to symbolize alteration in consciousness.... Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is an exception: it has no trends at all in either evaluation or primordial content. The story is about something else." (p. 329) "Book VI of the Aeneid and Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' are both about alteration of consciousness and about oconfronting and overcoming evil." (p. 339)Now, the bad: His work is subject to the same flaws as that of everyone who's used the psychological concept of "arousal potential". He graphs the basic relationship between arousal potential (AP) and hedonic value (p. 42), then immediately forgets about the right half of the graph and proceeds under the assumption that hedonic value increases monotonically with AP. The fact that it does not, and that creators are trying to maximize hedonic value by /optimizing/, not maximizing, arousal potential, for some reason escapes the attention of everyone working in this area. Second, he assumes that every person, presumably via some Lamarckian process, inherits the adaptation of every person prior to him or her in history, so that we in the 21st century are less interested in fugues than Bach was because we're more familiar and bored with them than he was. Martindale even tales up this objection, which has been made before, and rejects it with a nonsensical argument on page 49. He presents his theory as being about the evolution of music, but didn't understand what evolution is. When he says "evolution", he means its opposite: genetic drift in the absence of selection pressure. He says this is essential: "Evolution" only occurs when art proceeds without having any relevance to society at large. He actually calls selective pressure "non-evolutionary pressure". He assumes that whatever aesthetics is, it is not anything that real people like or want; their preferences can only contaminate aesthetic evolution. This is a radical unquestioned assumption. His notion of "evolution" by definition excludes any fitness measure other than AP. He seems to have forgotten entirely that he theorized that AP was important only by using a highly dubious argument that it increases hedonic value = aesthetic fitness. He also ought to spend more time explaining what "primordial content" (PC) is, since he spends the entire book measuring it. It comes from psychoanalysis and indicates regression into... something. The subconscious? The collective? The pre-human? His attempted explication (p. 49), equating primordial thought with detecting similarity and conceptual thought with making distinctions, is just a repetition of a common prejudice against "analytic" science that we have inherited from the Middle Ages and the romantic poets, of scientific thought as only dividing and never synthesizing. It has no real bearing on whatever it is that his construct measures. So the entire theoretical underpinnings of his research is extremely shaky. Fortunately he has lots of data. His interpretation of it, though, is usually statistically flawed. On p. 166-167 he describes computing a correlation using 150 samples, and says it results in "a marginally significant correlation of .14 with time.... If we [group datapoints together into 15 groups], the correlation is much higher--.66--and clearly significant." This proves that he has no idea at all of what statistical significance means or how to compute it, and so every claim in the book about significance is worthless. He tells us that his theory works with Hamlet, Cymbeline, and The Great Railway Bazaar (p. 318), but not how many books it didn't work with. This reduces much of his quantitative data to anecdotes. The most-common problem is that he would do some experiment rating people or works of art on, say, 20 different dimensions, most of which he didn't specify in this book, and nearly all of which, when revealed, are synonyms for either "primordial content" or "arousal potential". Then he does data fishing to find the two subsets of those 20 which have the highest correlation with PC and AP. Then, wonder of wonders, he finds one out of the ten million or so possible small subsets that correlates with those variables. Then he finds out what fraction of the variation in PC and AP those subsets account for. He declares that whatever is left over is therefore the maximum fraction of variation that other factors might account for. He is often pleased by r-squared values that are less than random if you account for his degrees of freedom. If you look on page 188, you'll find an experiment with Italian paintings in 20-year periods from 1330-1729. He had subjects rate painters along 24 dimensions, and then do factor analysis. Then he informs us that two of the resulting 5 dimensions corresponded to primordial content and arousal potential. We'd really like to know what the other factors were, and their relative importance, but he doesn't tell us. This is suspicious. Worse, when he tells us which dimensions correlated with arousal potential (active, complex, tense, disorderly) and which correlated with primordial content (not photographic, not representative of reality, otherworldly, and unnatural), it becomes clear that the first of these dimensions were designed to measure arousal potential, and the second set are all synonyms and clearly intended to measure primordial content. So the experiment didn't validate his two dimensions; it just asked people to rate paintings along them, then (surprise) pulled his planted measurements out of the factor analysis. He's guilty of cherry-picking data. On p.178 you'll find a chart of primordial content in pop music lyrics. He states that "there was a significant increase in primordial content from 1952-53 to 1958-59." But if you start at 1953 instead of 1952, it becomes a decrease; even more so if you end at 1960 or 1961. He had no conception of degrees of freedom. The section on cross-national synchrony in Chapter 7 is outrageous: He fit equations to explain how trends in one art in one country are influenced by trends in other arts in that country and other countries. But studying the equations on page 242, we realize that each of his fits has 17 degrees of freedom! And he's in every case constructing these to fit fewer than 17 datapoints! The first mystery is that they don't fit exactly. The second mystery is how he found these fits--there wasn't enough computer power in the world in 1990 to optimize the fit of a 17-dimensional equation, so when he says one set of parameters gives the best fit, he can't possibly know that. His quest for periodicity used tests that would (and often did) find periodicity in random walks. Every time he plots a bunch of points and says that the oscillations around a curve are statistically significant, count the number of times that a segment goes through one point before re-crossing the central curve, and the number of times it goes through 2 or more points. If those numbers are roughly equal, it indicates that the oscillation around the central curve is a random walk, and is not statistically significant. Out of figures 7.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.4, 9.20, and 9.21, only figures 9.1 and 9.21 pass this simple test. He's generally guilty of optimistic eyeballing of data. He analyzes Dante's Inferno and finds that "the main trend takes the shape of an M with an extra up-flourish at the end" (p. 323) Looking at figure 9.18, it's hard to imagine what the data could look like for him to not be able to interpret it that way. It's also full of post-hoc rationalization. (That is, he never predicted a test's outcome; he found the outcome, then justified it, often with some accommodating exceptions). For example, his study of American painters (p. 193-198) finds a single dip-rise in primordial content from 1800 to 1920, and so he designates that entire 120-year period as "American style". By never stating up front what he expects to find, he always interprets his result either as having proven his hypothesis (when they are consistent with it) or having proven something peculiar about the data (when they are not). Sometimes he claims to have proven both at the same time. On p. 191, he reports finding results for his Italian paintings experiment that match his predictions for the styles late gothic, renaissance-mannerist, baroque, and rococo. But what's "renaissance-mannerist"? It's a mashing together of two periods because the data doesn't come out as it should if they're two separate periods. "If one accepts the idea that primordial content rises once a style is in effect, the present results support the idea that mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style rather than a separate style" (p. 193). You can either assume A (mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style) and use it to prove B (that primordial content dips then rises within a style), or you can assume B and use it to prove A. You can't assume both A and B in order to prove B and A simultaneously. I give it 5 stars partly due to the state of literary theory in the 1990s. Hardly anybody else was doing any. The journals and institutions that used to study literary theory were instead either using literature as datapoints for sloppy linguistic philosophy, or as datapoints to prove that The Man was keeping their victim class of choice down. Martindale's work was deeply flawed, but was still the best work in literary theory that anybody did in that quarter century.

It might perhaps be difficult to think of something called "progress" as occurring in the arts. Works of art are to be contemplated for their own sake, and taste, subjective as it is, is supposed to govern the evaluation of art. Along these same lines, the appreciation of new forms or works of art may be highly variable from person to person, but it is probably fair to say, even without comprehensive statistical analysis, that originality or novelty in art is always welcomed by art lovers, and that as time wears on, these new works are gradually taken for granted. It then takes a new collection of works to grab one's attention, to effectively knock the art lovers out of their aesthetic equilibrium. The author of this book proposes a quantitative theory of how artworks evolve that has as its central thesis that artists are driven to produce novel works as their main goal. It is a highly interesting book, and one that might be given even greater support using more contemporary evidence. For example it would be a fascinating and possibly very fruitful project to connect the author's results with what is known in cognitive neuroscience.Of utmost importance for the author's thesis is the concept of `primordial cognition.' According to the author, this is a mode of cognition that is to be differentiated from the `conceptual' mode of cognition. The latter cannot produce novel ideas the author argues, but is directed towards analysis and discrimination. Primordial cognition, on the other hand, is `free-associative', irrational, and undirected, and when one engages in it this will increase the likelihood that novel combinations of mental elements will be generated. Therefore it is the primary method for producing creative works of art. The author is careful to note however that primordial cognition is not enough to produce innovative ideas. One will also require a large quantity of diverse `mental elements.' The main contribution that the author makes in this book is the construction of mathematical models that detect the degree of primordial cognition in an artist's work. It is the pressure to create novel works that drives the artist he argues, and to prove this he must examine various historical epochs with the goal of understanding to what degree poets, artists, and musicians made breaks with the styles or genres that came before them. His thesis, which he designates as a `psychological theory of aesthetic evolution', is an interesting one, and is a formidable undertaking considering the subjective nature of evaluating whether a work of art is novel.If a work of art is new, then it must induce feelings of excitement or elation on the part of the spectator. The author refers to this as the `arousal potential' of the work, and it can be measured according to its novelty, complexity, or variability. These measures should increase monotonically over time, he argues, if his thesis is valid. Primordial content should increase over long periods of time, and periods where it decreases should coincide with periods of stylistic change. Any talk of monotonic increase or periodicity of course is best done with mathematics, and luckily the author does not hesitate to use it in the book. His analysis involves mathematical tools such as time series, autoregressive processes, analysis of variance, multidimensional scaling, and to a small degree the theory of chaotic dynamical systems. The author however does not present all of these techniques at once, but draws on them as needed in the flow of the book. Autoregressive analysis in particular is applied very heavily in the book, since the value of primordial content at a given point in time is determined from prior values of primordial content. As in all mathematical and statistical analysis, the amount of available data will determine the accuracy of the results. The author is of course aware of these issues and addresses them throughout the book.To illustrate his analysis and techniques, the author has included chapters on French and British poetry and American poetry and literature. An interesting discussion that is included in these chapters regards the notion of `metaphor distance', which is a kind of data mining notion and which "locates" metaphors in poetry. And French poets, the author argues, increased arousal potential by increasing stylistic change or `depth of regression.' The latter is a moving away from `secondary-process cognition' (abstract and logical thinking) toward `primary-process cognition' (primordial cognition). Plotted throughout these chapters is the average percentage of primordial content versus time periods, which show for some examples (French poetry) that an initial increase of primordial content was correlated with the rise of the romantic style, and a decrease with the rise in surrealism. The author argues with supporting data analysis and fitting techniques that the data indicates that the arousal potential is increased by a combination of primordial cognition and stylistic change. Explicit equations relating the dependence of arousal potential to primordial cognition and stylistic change are given throughout these chapters.