The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future

Carney J. (2020) The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future. In: Carroll J., Clasen M., Jonsson E. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture. Springer, August 29 2020.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46190-4_8

Abstract: Though few would dispute that aesthetic style is a vehicle for cognitive effects, there is little systematic work that views style from anything other than a historical perspective. This chapter will outline how style, broadly conceived, can be understood as an attempt to avoid anxiety by gaining predictive traction on the future. The central claim will be that style evolved as complexity reduction device, to the extent that it is a predictive scheme that balances explanatory simplicity against model accuracy. I shall show that every given style achieves this by saturating the perceptual environment with evidence for a particular model of the world. This account of style explains several features of its target phenomenon, including its normative character, its polemical nature, and its transitory duration. It also allows for style to be seen as continuous with other complexity reduction strategies on the part of biological agents more generally. The discussion will be supported by a historical appreciation of how style has been theorized in the past, but my overall framework will be provided by information theory.

Keywords: Anxiety Style Prediction Aesthetics Cognition Model building