Enabling Limits
[This is what sprang to mind on Valentine’s Day].
Enabling limits are boundaries on what we can create or achieve that have a perversely liberating quality on our range of action. For example: painting traditionally has a limited capability for showing motion, as once fixed on a gallery wall a painting is fairly static; this limit required artists to craft techniques for showing movement that occasionally exceed actual movement in their beauty and resonance.
Another art example: since paintings don’t actually emit light, to capture light requires the use of inventive techniques like those that make Van Gogh so striking. That enabling limit, then, forced human creativity to proceed in a specific direction, solve a fundamental problem with the medium, and in doing so develop something beautiful. There are countless examples in design, music, film (think how much more effective most movies are when they don’t directly show or tell something, often for lack of budget or technological capability), and so on.
Often, people fight against enabling limits to their own detriment, in art and in design (particularly user interface and web design) but also in life. I sometimes think that a chief problem for modern Americans is that we are overwhelmed by choice, saturated with functional freedoms that inhibit decisions and devalue the liberties we savor. This freedom from all traditions and bonds of cultural inheritance was our goal in youth, but many of us look with envy on the lives of others around the world who seem more grounded in their particular social group.
Some people artificially reintroduce enabling limits into their lives: they build small patterns of behavior from which they won’t deviate as a means of asserting control over the empty stretches of purely free time many of us have. Some artists do the same.
Christian Bok, a Canadian poet, wrote one of the only formalist books I’ve ever loved, called Eunoia. It’s all online for free viewing; just click on each paragraph to go to the next. Divided into chapters which must use only one vowel (and whose words must all have that vowel), it obeys several other requirements: each chapter must describe a feast, a sea-going excursion, an erotic act, and must discuss the art of writing.
I thought the “I” chapter was pretty extraordinary. Through this limit, Bok achieves some striking phraseology and genuinely fascinating prose, not as a novelty but as the result of highly directed creativity.
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