I
Michelangelo put the carver’s task as liberating form from the surrounding stone. The self is the revealed form that already exists, when the surplusage is chipped away.
Adrian Stokes, art critic, took the distinction and extended it. For Stokes, the modeler fashions the self in contrast to the carver. The clay modeler has the more labile enterprise of molding, where the form is “not uncovered but created.” “The modeler realizes his design with clay. Unlike the carver, he does not envisage that the conception is enclosed in his raw material.” In comparison to stone, “the plastic material has no ‘rights’ of its own. . .Modeling is a much more ‘free’ activity than carving”. (Think of “modeling” not as computer simulation but as Stokes did, molding).
II
Adam Phillips, the essayist and therapist, returns to Stokes’s distinction as two distinct approaches to an individual’s selfhood and experience: “It is as though there are things that are always already there which we may or may not find; and there are things which we make, which we put there and by so doing add something to the world that wasn’t there previously”.
What interests Phillips is that “[e]ach of these two versions involves us in telling a different kind of story about the self”. The modeler “uses his art to expose, to extend, to fashion himself”, while the carver abstains from promoting the self in favor of responding to the otherness of the object. Yet in both, a version of the self is operating—“the carver forgets himself…the modeler endorses himself”.
The difficulty with the carver is that, in seeing herself as deferring to what is already there, she renders herself oddly immune to criticism by a world that responds to her acts nevertheless; it is as if she submerges her own egotism in the name of making what is revealed wholly visible as its own, regardless.
The difficulty with the molder (our modeler) is the reverse. It is her hubris, her own truth that is imposed upon a seemingly moldable reality. She acts as if reality is worse off for not having this truth.
III
What works better, carving or modeling? It is premature to choose between the two versions of self when other selves exist from which to (s)elect. To carving stone and modeling clay, we must at least add improvising the self from what is at hand, which involves something different—good enough but in ways that matter better still than stone, clay and equivalent.
What Phillips calls “the contingent self” is one who makes use of luck, accident, and coincidence that befall him or her. S/he improvises a life within a network of others that improvises him/her. (This, of course, is also a weak-spot of the contingent self who is always, if you will, being prepped for more surgery.)
Now, of course, there are those who promise to mold or carve the Anthropocene into the preferred selves. My bet, though, is on the improvisers,
Principal sources
Phillips, A. (1994). On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
————– (2004). On not making it up, Or the varieties of creative experience. Salmagundi, no. 143 (Summer): 56-75.
Stokes, A. (1978). The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Volume I: 1930-1937, Thames and Hudson: GB.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 