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Negative Capabilityeverything2.com/?node=negative+capability
414 sats \ 3 comments \ @billytheked 22h the_stacker_muse
A phrase coined by Keats, the 19th century poet, to describe the power of sympathy and a freedom from self-consciousness that tend to be a special (or at least a heightened) characteristic of artists. The source is a letter of 22 December 1817: there is a quality that goes "to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
The concept of negative capability is one that has been further developed in both the romantic amd modernist literary traditions, contributing both to the rival doctrines of sincerity and "the truth of masks".
One wonders whether the issues and debates that have surrounding negative capability within the sphere of literary criticism have not now achieved a wider and more general significance in online communities, where essentially literary production is now a commonplace, though not always appreciated as such. In essense, it seems to me a far greater proportion of the population have become (loosely speaking) "artists," due to the commonplace availability of the internet and Web as a means of distribution and presentation, and thus are faced with the issues of identity, self and selflessness about which Keats' notions have prompted speculation and debate. One can see virtually the same conflict in play between those who prefer (or demand) that online personae be "real" and sincere and those who glory in their seeming freedom to assume and discard various masks and disguises at will, sometimes for criminal purposes, but probably more often for sheer play value and to explore one's own psyche or to probe the responses of others.
My first thought when I bit this off and started chewing was, are some people really there?
I mean. I try to imagine meeting Keats (1795-1821) and probing him to see whether he was really made of the same stuff as people of today. I suppose not. I suppose, also, that he wasn't really made up the same as those in his day 1.
Even reading, twenty-five years later, ebbixx's reflection on the tension between the sincere and the masquerader feels anachronistic. The beast, which then was only beginning to hatch, is now fully fledged and prowling on souls.
Do I think we've come a long way from artists being able to channel that ecstasy Keats talked about? Probably.
Is it gone? I hope not.

Footnotes

  1. the man whose epitaph reads, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." ↩
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17 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 22h
For many years now, we've had a channel in SN's internal chat dedicated to negative capability, a 'yes, and' channel1, where we're all welcome to share wild ideas and entrusted with the difficulty of not judging them and living with their possibility.
I take negative capability very seriously because I think creativity is made of the stuff. That is, I think creativity is accepting some idea as a constraint, then attempting to establish a new idea coherent with the first, and so on. In image diffusion machine learning models they call this locality and translational equivariance.

Footnotes

  1. Negative capability was too confusing for anyone unfamiliar so I explain it using the improv philosophy instead. ↩
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @billytheked OP 21h
creativity is made of the stuff. That is, I think creativity is accepting some idea as a constraint, then attempting to establish a new idea coherent with the first, and so on.
Agreed. What I struggle with is whether there is a point of diminishing return, so to speak. It would seem that under too many (internalized) constraints, creativity might be stifled.
It sounds like your channel curates an atmosphere where anything goes, no matter how zany or inane, which only really works if everyone involved suspends judgement, and accept the new logic from which the first idea sprung.
As a side note, some of my favourite movies/books are those where, right away, you are forced to suspend your disbelief, and accept the (un)logic of the new universe. The Naked Gun did this to a ridiculously comedic effect.
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 20h
What I struggle with is whether there is a point of diminishing return, so to speak. It would seem that under too many (internalized) constraints, creativity might be stifled.
Yes, you need an escape hatch when you go too far afield and are over-constrained. I only commit to negative capability when I'm in the ideation phase because I find there's always an escape hatch there. Before I begin spending expensive kinds of effort, I'll apply judgement. It's a lot harder to pull the plug when you've sunk a lot of cost.
which only really works if everyone involved suspends judgement
Yes, definitely. Even I struggle with it sometimes and I'll excuse myself from replying when I don't have the patience to diffuse my judgement. What's most important to me is that the folks involved accept the premise, and are capable of suspending judgement.1

Footnotes

  1. To think one's negativity is of special value, despite negativity being abundant in relative terms, is to be the kind of asshole that also lacks insight. ↩
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